


never a saint took pity

by stilitana



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Amputation, Enemies to...still enemies but ones that discuss morality/human nature over dinner?, Gen, Injury, Medical Inaccuracies, Moral Bankruptcy, Reconciliation, Supernatural Elements, Survivor Guilt, Uneasy Allies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-06-27 19:41:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15692082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: Goodsir lives. So does Hickey. They have very different ideas on what to do about that.(“Listen, Mr. Goodsir. I know things seem a little bleak, but we’ve got more going for us than you might realize.”Goodsir’s eyes widen and he gapes. “Going for us—what’ve we got going for us? Everyone is dead, some directly because of you. Everyone else is gone.”“Get a hold of yourself. That doesn’t mean we’ve got to die.”“No, but it means we really should’ve.”)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really liked the dynamic between these two and was really curious how a post-canon interaction between them would go down. 
> 
> Notice the tags say reconciliation, not redemption. This is not a fix-it where I try to justify the characters' actions or make them into anything other than what they were in the show. But forgiveness between two people under extreme circumstances is honestly the most interesting thing in the world and has almost nothing to do with being earned or deserved SO here it is...
> 
> If you enjoy this story or have a critique, please feel free to leave a comment letting me know! Thanks for reading.

            A thing of beauty, a crystal tower jagging through the ice, piercing the sky, the sky blue as acid and dripping, eating holes in the ice, the ice all blue as fire inside, and full of bodies inside, frozen floating bodies, and light—light on the water, light under the water, and a sound like wind whistling through a straw with an opening the width of a single strand of hair, a strand of long, glossy black hair, attached to the head of the woman, a woman with roots like a tree where there are no trees for miles, a thing of beauty in the air above him.

            Goodsir is not Goodsir again for a while. He comes back to himself in degrees. He groans and froths at the mouth and vomits on himself and his limbs tremble and he begs God and his guardian angels to deliver him a little swifter, that’s all he asks now, but invisible hands hold him down, press hard on his chest, and he stays in his body, in his body that is cold, dying meat, he stays and he lives.

 

            He wonders when his story went from one of adventure to one of horror. Maybe the boy—the boy with the ring, the boy who begged not to be autopsied, who screamed so dreadfully at his final hour. Goodsir went against his final wishes. Maybe then he cursed them all.

            Or was it when he first began seeing those black lines in the men’s’ gums, those mysterious symptoms, the specter of something terrible lurking just beyond his comprehension?

            Maybe it was when he couldn’t save the Inuk man, Lady Silence's father. He couldn’t save a lot of people. Not even the monkey. Was it when he poisoned that damn monkey and knew they’d done the same to themselves, for years?

            When Lady Silence staggered into Carnival, dripping blood from her mouth? When the place went up in flames?

            No—no, right after, when he learned he was the best excuse left for a doctor, when the health of all the dying man was placed in his hands, but he too was poisoned, and there was nothing he could do for any of them, nothing.

            Or had he retained some scrap of childish yearning, even then…all snuffed out completely when he was made to butcher the man Gibson.

            All irrelevant now, he supposed. A useless line in the snow, the sort of fact historians might ponder over if ever there was to be some further expeditions, down the line. And they would find his papers…yes, his papers. He had written things down that would survive him. He drifted again into unconsciousness, comforted by his handwriting, which would remain in the world, his signature on the world, proof he had been there, once, too, alive as anybody had ever been.

 

            He does at long last come out of it. He can’t deny any longer that he is alive, that he failed even here, where he should have been flawless, at his very own trade, the destruction of the human body.

            Oh, well.

            If he waits a little longer it’ll all be over anyway, one way or another.

 

            Harry Goodsir stands on shaky legs and bundles himself. He cleans and bandages the wounds that failed to kill him in a magnificent stroke of bad luck. He drinks some water, he sticks a piece of leather cut from a boot or a wallet or a belt into his mouth so he has something to chew, even if he can’t bring himself to swallow it. He’s not hungry anymore. He starts to walk.

            It’s not hard to track them, though he doesn’t really try. He staggers through the cold, the cold like daggers on his exposed skin, and something is wrong inside him, his head is foggy, he sees swirls of light at the corners of his eyes, and none of it matters. It’ll end the same way now. He decided when he turned down the human flesh; he decided to die with at least that one piece of himself unsullied, and so it will be now, again. He is untroubled. They are all doomed; he has made his choice of how to die, and they have made theirs.

 

            There is blood on the snow, blood not yet frozen, but no longer warm and steaming. No sign of Francis; the rest of them in pieces. He doesn’t look longer than he needs to confirm that they are passed on.

            The largest puddle of blood is beside the beast, the Tuunbaq, and he feels a pang when he sees it, the monster slain, looking skinny and sick and ragged, because it killed, yes, it slaughtered, but it did not murder, it was even beautiful, in a way—he no longer cared if it was blasphemy to say so. A beautiful, lethal, tremendous part of the culture and the land they had blundered into like a pack of fools, and here it lay, and here they lay beside it, all dead, and for what? If they could only have left each other alone, never met—let it carry out its life here in the tundra, let the rest play out their little dramas back someplace warm.

            Too late, it was always too late. From the instant they set sail they’d begun digging one mass grave, the whole lot of them going down together.

            He is musing so deeply and still so foggy from the grief and the sickness and the drugs and blood loss he doesn’t notice at first that something is horribly amiss, more so even than the gore surrounding him. Something is unnatural, wrong in a way that raises the hair on his arms and makes his heart thud out of rhythm. He looks down and focuses on the beast’s stomach. Its been slit open, hot guts spilling onto the snow, but something is…there is the faintest stirring beneath the fur and the flesh.

            Harry recoils, stumbles back a step, claps a hand to his mouth to stem the bile churning in his stomach. He reels. It can’t be alive, it can’t, not that, anything else…

            He takes deep breaths through his nose. The Tuunbaq is dead. That is plain, it lies slain before him. It is dead, but something in its stomach is feebly stirring, and there, among the guts, is that not the jutting angle of a man’s bony knee and shin, his pale, slender fingers spilled among the guts?

            Just as Harry is about to turn away, unable to look a second longer at the terrible contents of the creature’s stomach, the fingers twitch, and a faint, heart-wrenching moan emanates from the creature. A man’s feeble whimper. Harry steps forwards. There was one man missing from the bodies strewn about, one man who he had searched for and felt dread pool in his belly when he failed to identify him among the dead. Hickey.

            Harry kneels stiffly, painfully, on aching joints. There beside the fingers gently grasping the air lies a small, thin object. A knife. Harry picks it up out of the blood, plucks it from the range of the reaching fingers, and wipes it clean on his coat so he can read the name etched on its hilt to confirm what he already knows.

            At least the frigid temperatures have kept the smell largely at bay.

            He didn’t used to think such morbid thoughts. Or maybe he did. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, what was normal before this; before grasping the hand reaching from the dead monster’s stomach and pulling the body free, with tremendous effort from his wasted muscles, from the bloody chasm. It is like a hideous, hellish birth; Hickey slides free, covered head to toe in blood and viscera, squirming faintly. Harry lets go of his arm—his singular arm, he sees now, the other torn off above the elbow—and Hickey lies writhing on the ice, in a pool of blood, a pool of his own blood mingling with the creature’s, and Harry would laugh if he had any humor left in him at all, even though there’s nothing funny about how he can’t rightly say which of the creatures before him is more a monster.

            Men pushed to their limits…men pushed beyond their limits…can he judge Hickey? He can, and he did, and he does, but is it just? When did Hickey’s adventure become a horror story, or had he been living on the fringe even before, had it already been a nightmare? Goodsir thinks it probably was. And he was small. He looked frail and tiny lying there on the ice. Goodsir had forgotten how small the other man really was, short of stature, a slight bone structure. Yes—a small man like that, half the size of some of the men, would surely have felt the effects of the lead more than most. More than most. Not that it was an excuse. There could be no excuses. The land around them was too harsh for that, it tore away their excuses, wouldn’t afford anybody that luxury. But it was maybe a way to understand, and Goodsir desperately wanted to understand, because if he could reason his way to how the world made a creature like Hickey, maybe he wouldn’t be so troubled by it. If there were reasons, if under extreme circumstances a man could be pushed—an otherwise ordinary man, a man like any other, with both good and bad in him—to become so completely delusional, then it did not go at all against Harry’s tattered idea of morality, which was his single remaining precious possession, more precious than his life, which he’d already tried to throw away though he’d held fiercely onto morality. He didn’t want to believe that some men were just born bad. Wicked beyond reason. No, that didn’t make sense, that didn’t feel right. Not right at all. This was a man like any other. This was only a bad man because he’d consistently made bad choices.

            Well, as far as ratios go, the odds were stacked against them in that regard. Choices were few. The bad outnumbered the good in legions.

            Goodsir couldn’t have explained why he leaned forward then to wipe the blood off Hickey’s face. There wasn’t a reason, he didn’t think about it. He didn’t have to think. Here was a man, as badly broken as any he’d ever seen; poisoned by lead, starved, maimed, drained of blood, frozen, completely alone and defenseless. And here was he—the only doctor at his side. His role in life was to help. As long as he helped, he was doing what he ought to be doing, he was lightening the world’s burden of hurt. There was nothing else left. It wasn’t even a question. Of course he helped.

            Goodsir wiped Hickey’s face. Hickey’s eyelids fluttered and he gurgled, a sluggish stream of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. That was never a good sign. Harry was too weak to lift him and didn’t even think of dragging the boat. With a large blade he found among its wrecked provisions, he cut what he could carry of the Tuunbaq’s meat, and then bent with a groan and grabbed Hickey beneath the armpits, wrapping his arms around the smaller man’s shoulders and lifting him as much as he could.

            Goodsir began to drag him along the ice. It was slow going. He thought idly it was likely one or both of them would die before they made it back. They should both be dead already, this he knew. It would be kinder to die now. But he was alive and Hickey was alive and without thinking about it, he strived to keep the other man that way. If he could not care for himself, he could care for someone else, even a murderous monster. There was nothing left. They’d both lost it all, there was no one around for Hickey to hurt anymore. Goodsir didn’t think he had it in him to attempt to kill himself again, and he would prefer his last hours or days be spent doing what he loved, caring for another, not alone in the cold wasteland. It didn’t matter who his company was. They were very far beyond that.

           

            Somehow they make it back to the mutineers’ camp. Goodsir wonders if this stroke of good luck will last. He knows that it will not. Still, how cruel that it should only be now, when there is nothing left in all the world for him, that the things that should be killing them seem to have lost interest.

            He drags Hickey into the tent where he’d butchered the men and hauls him with difficulty onto the table. He tears his shirt off at the shoulder and cleans the mangled arm.

            “Mr. Hickey,” he says.

            Hickey’s eyes flicker beneath the lids, rolling in their sockets. He makes a moaning, gurgling noise and more blood dribbles past his lips.

            Harry frowns and then gently presses his fingers on either side of Hickey’s mouth to make it open. What he sees makes his breath catch. The tongue mutilated as well, the tip cut off, the rest sitting in a pool of semi-clotted blood, jagged on the end. Not like Lady Silence or her father; clean cuts all the way back, the entire appendage severed in one curt stroke.

            Harry sighs and lets go of Hickey’s face and thinks like so many of the men he might not have met so grisly a fate had he not vastly overestimated his own intelligence. He guessed wrong, of course the mutiny would end in ruin, of course he couldn’t control the Tuunbaq, if that was indeed what he'd been aiming for, and it looked like it was. His skill was resourcefulness and cunning and a keen understanding of the needs and desires of the men around him; not a preternatural intuition as he’d seemed to think. Grandiose delusions. Goodsir wonders how much of that was Hickey, and how much was Hickey starved and poisoned, humiliated by lashing and lied to.

            “Hickey,” Goodsir says again, but the man won’t wake.

            Goodsir starts snipping the flesh that can’t be saved. Hickey mumbles and whimpers but doesn’t rouse himself from whatever stupor he’s in. When his eyelids flicker only the whites of his eyes show. Perhaps he’s past some threshold of pain and can’t feel any more than he already is, even when Goodsir has to saw the bone further up, preserving as much skin as he can so that he can fold it over and stitch it shut.

            It’s not a proper operation.

            That goes without saying.

            Even if by some miracle Hickey survives the next few days, Goodsir suspects the arm will be in some measure of agony for however long he lives, too badly mangled, too hastily mended.

            The tongue he’s not sure what to do with. He makes Hickey drink a sip of a tonic he prepares to clean the blood from his mouth, to disinfect the wound and hasten the clotting process. The man chokes and can’t seem to swallow. Harry holds him against his chest, the only position he can keep Hickey upright in with his diminished strength, and waits for it to go down, makes him drink more.

            He wonders what he’ll do, if Hickey dies first.

           

            Days pass. Hickey is largely unresponsive. Goodsir begins to wonder if the Tuunbaq mangled more than his body, if it got at the soul, if he’s not saved a man at all but just a lump of inert flesh. The idea sickens him. Before coming here, he would never have entertained the notion; now he doesn’t hesitate to consider the idea of the supernatural.

            His days revolve around caring for Hickey. It is his entire occupation, he devotes himself wholly to it. He does not dismiss the idea that this may be the afterlife, the both of them condemned to spend it together, and he wonders idly if any of the others are here in limbo as well. He wonders about Crozier, the only other man he didn’t find at the sight, and tries not to indulge in fantasies of the captain showing up one day, with the men behind him, here to save Harry from this nightmare, of the captain guiding him back to the ship, which is free of the ice and full of the bustling of the crew.

            He has panic attacks in his sleep, not so much when he is awake.

            Hickey heals faster and better than he has any right to, given that all the odds are against him. The man’s body is fighting with all it has to cling to life, even if that life is a shadow of what it was, even if it means unending pain.

            If nothing else, Harry can admire his tenacity. He realizes they are two very different types. Harry can’t imagine why anybody would still, at this point, want to live so very badly.

            Easier to die. The easiest thing any of them will have done in a long while. All you have to do is let go and wait.

 

            Eating the Tuunbaq is strange. He wonders if the meat will poison him, take him over from within, turn him into something terrible. He is so hungry it doesn’t matter; the hunger is like a permanent hole in his middle, constantly expanding outwards. He can feel himself weakening second by second, so he cuts the meat and eats it, and it is tough but not so odd tasting as he’d expected. He only lets himself have a little at a time lest he vomit up his only food supply. He goes back and butchers the creature, brings back on several trips the meat, preserves and stores it as best he can.

            He doesn’t know why he bothers. Maybe some of Hickey’s pig-headed struggle to survive is rubbing off on him. The man is still mostly unconscious and Harry isn’t sure if he’s mentally there, if Hickey the man he knew still exists inside the body, or if the lead and the trauma have riddled his brain with so many holes he can’t tell up from down.

            Only time will tell. Time they for some reason have entirely more than their fair share of.

            He thinks about his family. His brother. His only real remaining hope is that not they nor anyone else ever come looking for them. Let them be lost to the ice.

           

            His strength returns bit by bit and he wonders, he constantly wonders, just what properties the meat he is consuming possesses, and if he might be absorbing them, and he waits to be terrified but it’s no use, he’s fresh out of horror.

            Or maybe he’s not. It kicks in when he’s thinking about Lady Silence while having his dinner, maybe five days after finding Hickey, and thinking about her people’s stories, and how she’d described the Tuunbaq to the officers, and then he looks down at his plate of meat and goes numb because can he be sure it’s a beast? Was it not an uncanny creature, uncannily man-like in the face, was it not intelligent…

            Goodsir does not want to be a cannibal. But this is ludicrous. It’s a bear, he tells himself, ferociously. Just a bear, a bear. Not a man. And if not a bear, still, not a man, a creature, unlike any other, but still no man.

            The horror dulls but remains lodged in him. He finishes his supper.

            Feeding Hickey is a challenge. He finally builds a fire, smashing crates from one of the other tents for tinder, and boils the meat in a pot, feeds Hickey the broth. He wonders if the meat and its properties are aiding Hickey’s remarkable recovery. It wouldn’t be unheard of, all kinds of things found in nature have medicinal uses, perhaps this increased healing factor is one of them, from this most rare creature…

            Or maybe his shattered, unoccupied mind is grasping at absurdities. There's nothing else left to hold on to.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently Hickey's actor read Jean Genet to prepare for the role and that's uh...pretty wild. If you've not read Genet I really recommend The Thief's Journal if you want to change your life and probably for the worse. Worth it though, them's some good reads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for reading!!  
> If you ever want to chat feel free to find me on tumblr at stilitana.
> 
> Also: you guys probably know this but I unfortunately only found out recently when I was watching Kamau Bell's show that esk*mo is today considered an offensive term. Thanks to Cicadaemon for alerting me to the historical spelling.
> 
> [Here](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/24/475129558/why-you-probably-shouldnt-say-eskimo) is an article I found interesting for a brief overview of the word in case anyone is interested. I will continue striving to learn and reflect awareness in my writing, though I still have a long way to go, so please always feel free to let me know if I've said something amiss!

            The doctor frets and fusses over him day and night. There is never a moment when Hickey can sneak some bit of glass or surgical implement onto his person to arm himself. Even if such an opportunity arose, he doubts very much that he’d have the strength to stand. His body feels leaden, his blood pumped full of something heavy and thick like syrup. He’s lopsided. Lighter on one side. He tries flexing his fingers and only five of them seem to respond. He can feel that he’s clenching the other five, but there’s no corresponding sensation, they don’t brush against fabric or smart with cold.

            Not to mention his face, which feels hideously swollen and heavy, deformed, like his mouth is some piece of meat crudely stitched on. He tastes blood constantly and he tosses his head feebly from side to side and moans, or tries to moan, the name that’s ringing around in his head, Gibson, Will Gibson, Billy. That’s his blood, isn’t it, and why, where is he? Hickey can’t think in straight lines anymore, maybe hasn’t in a while, but it’s worse now; his mind runs in circles around itself, he arrives where he began no clearer than before. Apart from his mangled body something else is…wrong, inside, he feels dismantled.

            Worse than his injuries is the maddening lack of control. He is entirely at the anatomist’s mercy. If Goodsir rescinds his care, Hickey will die. But is it care or torture he is receiving? He can’t be sure. Maybe the man means to keep him here, immobile and in agony, indefinitely. He can’t get a read on the man. Goodsir handles him roughly sometimes, harsh fingers prodding at his injuries, forcing liquid down his throat even as he chokes on it. Other times he is tender, wipes Hickey’s brow with a warm cloth, holds Hickey’s back against his chest.

            He is thankful more than anything that he is largely unconscious. The pain and mutilation are bearable. He’s been in pain before. But the humiliation of being cared for like a child by a man who hates him is beyond his ability to handle.

            It occurs to him that Goodsir’s help may only continue so long as Hickey remains docile and unconscious. Maybe if he plays the fool, Goodsir will keep protecting him. If he never reveals that his mind is still lying dormant beneath the surface, if he stays unconscious, if he can convince the other man he is harmless, deaf and dumb…

            But Hickey never was able to keep still and it’s not long before he betrays himself. Goodsir is inspecting his mouth and Hickey does his best to keep his gaze glassy and unfocused, which isn’t especially difficult, though he longs to smirk or sneer or snap his teeth at Goodsir, when he catches sight of something glinting on the table beside Goodsir’s instruments. A familiar gold ring, the ring Billy wore around his neck on a string. His eyes widen in recognition, the light of awareness comes into them. Goodsir follows his gaze, looks between him and the ring, slowly, and Hickey avoids his gaze but Goodsir is relentless, stares until Hickey looks up at him.

            “Mr. Hickey?” Goodsir says. There’s disgust in his gaze. Pity, also. Mostly he just looks tired and resigned.

            Hickey finally lets himself grin his smuggest grin and it makes his mouth ache horribly. He nods.

            “You recognize that?” Goodsir asks, nodding at the ring.

            Hickey nods again. He opens his mouth to speak and a bit of blood leaks from the corner of his lips. He tries to say Gibson’s, but his voice is garbled and sloppy.

            Understandable enough, though. Goodsir shakes his head. “No. Not Gibson’s. Someone else’s. You stole it.”

            Hickey shrugs. “Reappropriated,” he says.

            “Why?"

  
            “Bribe,” he says. He thinks back to Billy’s closed eyes, the lashes fluttering, his doubtful face and then the soft, slow smile that had spread across it like sunlight when he looked down at the ring, and Hickey couldn’t help but smile in return, as sincere a smile as he’d ever given. “And gift,” he adds.

            Goodsir sighs and shakes his head. “Don’t lie, Mr. Hickey. There’s no point, anymore.”

            Hickey’s brow scrunches. He shakes his head. When Goodsir makes to turn away, Hickey grabs his wrist and holds him there.

            “Not lying,” he says.

            Goodsir must read the question in his eyes because he says, “You gifted a piece of stolen jewelry to the man you killed and had me butcher?”

            Hickey nods, smiles, looks up at the billowing canvas of the tent. “Mercy.”

            “Mercy?”

            “He was dying slow. Hurting.”

            Goodsir gives a dry laugh. A bitter, empty laugh. It doesn’t suit him at all, this hollowness. “So you mean to say you cared for him?”

            Hickey glares at him, leans forward. “How dare you.”

            “Excuse me?”

            Hickey releases his wrist, ashamed that he had felt even for a second compelled to justify himself to Goodsir. It wasn’t up to Goodsir, to determine what Hickey had or had not felt. Goodsir didn’t deserve to know what lay at the bottom of his heart, he was unworthy. Who was he, to decide what was and wasn’t caring, anyway, what had he ever done…

            Hickey turned away from him and pressed his remaining hand to his mouth, pressed it hard against his teeth. His eyes burned. His throat felt tight. What was wrong with him? With mounting horror, he realized the hot pressure against his eyes was tears. He needed to pummel himself, stab himself, pinch until he bruised to make it stop, but Goodsir was sitting right there, staring. So he savagely stomped down on the wave of something he didn’t have a word for which was bearing down on him, turned back to Goodsir with a sly smile, his eyes red and shining.

            “You were right,” he says. “I did know how. To cut them. If it was anyone else, would’ve done it. But not him. Never thanked you, for that.”

            “Please don’t.”

            Hickey just grinned. His mouth started to bleed in earnest; he caught the blood in his hand.

            “You shouldn’t talk so much,” Goodsir said, getting him a bowl to bleed into while he prepared another salve to stem the flow. “That’ll never heal.”

            And Hickey knew in his heart there was nothing left to leverage against Goodsir, no way to manipulate him, that he was all out of tricks, but he wasn’t ready to accept it. All the same he couldn’t stop hot tears burning down his face. He didn’t have the vocabulary to give language to whatever it was, this great black mountain he’d thought he’d been running from which had been growing closer all the while, chasing him from room to room. He’d thought he’d been running toward something, something that had its hooks in his chest—but all along there’d been this horrible thing lurking behind, chasing him further. Not just physical distance, but distance of another kind, between himself and other people. There was a great gulf between him and everybody else. At first that hadn't been his fault. His station in life had alienated him. But in all his attempts to bridge it he'd only widened the gap until he stopped trying and now he suspected that even if he wanted to cross it, he'd be unable. Oh, well.

            He scrubbed his hand across his face so Goodsir wouldn’t see. When he turned back around Goodsir hesitated, must have seen something in Hickey’s face that took him aback; he quickly smothers it and looks away, purses his lips.

            “Your voice sounds different,” he says.

            “No tongue,” Hickey says, grinning and pointing.

            “No, not that. I mean the accent.”

            Oh. Yes, he’d been letting it slip since the boat, with Crozier. Not that he’d been so good at hiding it in the first place. With his voice, with every little gesture, he betrayed himself. Everyone did. He shrugs. “No point.”

            “No. No point.”

 

            Eating is agony. Anything that disturbs the wound in his mouth sends his entire skull lighting up like a lantern with pain. He’s been subsisting off broth and has lost weight he can’t afford to lose. Goodsir brings him a plate of meat and Hickey hesitates, looks up at him questioningly.

            “Tuunbaq,” says Goodsir.

            “Hm,” says Hickey, taking the plate and staring down at it contemplatively. The two of them are sitting on the ground beside Goodsir’s little fire. The man was more resourceful than Hickey had given him credit for. He’d have figured him for dead in a day on his own without somebody there telling him what to do.

            Not that Goodsir hadn’t tried, of course.

            Hickey had found the body and thought about butchering it, but then things had been happening quickly, it was better to put his plan into action, and he’d overheard a conversation between Goodsir and Crozier that he didn’t like the sound of one bit. Something about eating only his heels. Highly suspicious, he’d thought at the time. Amazing, the things people would say to each other, right where anybody might hear if he happened to be passing by a tent or an open door.

            Hickey sets the plate on the ground so he can pick the meat up with his remaining hand. He inspects it. Looks like any other meat. He puts it in his mouth, starts to tentatively chew, and immediately stops because pain shoots up the socket of every tooth, lights his tongue on fire. He sits very still and breaths through his nose. Goodsir is staring at him so Hickey looks resolutely at the fire and very deliberately forces himself to swallow the unchewed hunk of meat. He gags a bit, starts to choke; he hadn’t realized how much he needed his tongue even just to swallow. Goodsir moves as if to come closer and Hickey flinches away, glares at him. He stops choking.

        _There, that’ll show him,_ he thinks. Show him what, he doesn’t bother wondering. If he can’t wield any actual power he’ll settle for petulance.

            “That’s not going to work,” Goodsir says, taking the food away.

            Hickey grunts at him and reaches for it but Goodsir steps neatly out of reach and starts eating Hickey’s food right in front of him. Hickey just watches and grins because it’s funny, he hadn’t taken Goodsir for one to show such overt displays of dominance, for no good reason, where none is necessary, just flexing his superiority for the hell of it. Fine. Hickey knows his place in this new hierarchy. It’s one he may not like but which makes sense. He is an invalid, will die without Goodsir’s care. He must submit or perish, and he wants very much to live. As long as the order is rational he can find no fault with it, though if he heals up enough to put up a fight, he will make Goodsir pay for this little show he’s putting on, make him submit.

            Except Goodsir is not eating the food. He’s chewing it up and spitting it back onto the plate.

            Hickey wrinkles his nose. How wasteful, what the hell is he doing? Goodsir holds the plate out, expression unreadable. Hickey looks from it to him.

            “Take it and eat.”

            Hickey scoffs. So not only is he to be put in his place so rudely, he’s also to be humiliated, his nose rubbed in it. He turns his face away.

            Goodsir sighs. “You need to eat solid food. This will be easier to swallow. I’m not trying to…you’re ridiculous,” he snaps, suddenly going from resigned to furious in a second. Hickey looks back, eyes glittering and sharp, suddenly keen as he always is when somebody gets angry. It pays to know where the exits are, when you’re around someone with a temper.

            “We are alone, in the middle of the Arctic,” Goodsir says. “There’s no one else, there’s nothing. We should both be dead, and we surely will be soon, and because of you—but you’re still playing games. This isn’t some kind of punishment, Mr. Hickey. You’re not being lashed.”

            Hickey winces and covers it with a smirk, remembering that, yes, it had unfortunately been Goodsir who’d seen to his wounds after that incident as well.

            The fight goes out of Goodsir; he slumps. “Eat it or not, it’s up to you,” he mumbles, setting the plate down. He looks down, then glances up at Hickey, a little of the old spark Hickey had noticed in him back on the ship flashing for a moment in his eyes as he says, “But it’s a horrible moment to indulge your pride over your practicals.”

            Hickey’s eyes go wide. Goodsir turns away from him and goes back into the tent, and Hickey can’t help it, it flutters up in his chest and won’t be smothered. He laughs until his face hurts and he’s out of breath, he howls with laughter, lies on his back on the hard rocks while the stars spin above him and shakes.

            Then he eats.

 

            He hears things now, sometimes. Voices. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just that when he’s lying down at night, he can almost feel breath stirring the hair beside his ear, and there is Billy’s voice whispering so faintly he has to strain to hear it, and even then it’s incomprehensible. He thinks it might not be words at all, at least not in any language he knows, just gibberish.

            Hickey is not inclined to believe in ghosts. The notion is too fanciful, too romantic—the idea that the soul lives on beyond the body. But Tozer had sounded so sure he’d watched the Tuunbaq do…do something with Collins’, when he’d died. Watched it suck it right out of him. And stranger things had happened.

            And maybe these ghosts weren’t like the ones people wanted to be real, proof of life after death. Only death after death, unending. What if they were trapped here? This wasn’t their native land. What if…what if that thing had done something, to all of them, and some part of every man was still lingering?

            Other than Collins, of course. Hickey guessed by this logic that would make him well and truly dead. As opposed to…what, half dead? Undead?

            In any case, that’s Billy’s voice alright, mumbling nonsense. It’s horrible. Hickey lies on his back in the dark tent and presses his hand to his ear, but he can’t cover the other and the whispering shifts over to that one. Goodsir is asleep on the other side of the tent, snoring faintly.

            “Stop,” Hickey whispers.

            Billy doesn’t stop. If anything, he gets louder. Though the words are unfamiliar, his tone and cadence feel plucked right from Hickey’s memories; a thousand hellos and goodbyes, dirty jokes below deck, sweet nothings, soft remarks, dry retorts, that particular long-suffering, sorrowful tone Billy always used when he knew he was about to give in and let Hickey have whatever it was he wanted.

            Hickey grits his teeth. He won’t beg. He rises from his cot and with one last glance at Goodsir, steps out into the frigid night. He walks a few feet from the tent and stops, not daring to go further, wanting to keep the tent where Harry was sleeping in his sight. Childish fear of the dark and the things that lurk in it creep up in him. He had so much worse things to be afraid of all his life, how foolish that now all of a sudden he should regress. He paces back and forth on the rocks.

            “And what would you have had me do, hm?” he snarls, keeping his clumsy voice low and quiet. “Let you die slow, let you feel full of glass, like Goodsir said? I didn’t murder you. I spared you.”

            The murmuring gets louder, it sounds angry, and Hickey thinks he is starting to make out words now; _I know, I know, it was the kindest thing you ever did, but still, in the back…_

            “This is all your fault. If you hadn’t been weak, you’d still be here, you should’ve tried harder. You left me, get it? You left me, not the other way around. Remember that, Billy.”

            _Not my fault, yours, yours. I never wanted anything more, just company, we were both so lonely, it’s you who took and took and used us all up until there was nothing._

“Not fair,” Hickey snaps, sounding to his own ears like a bratty child. “I was the only one who was thinking, somebody had to do something, so I did. Me, just me. If anybody else had stepped up—but they didn’t. So you’ve got no right to complain. What do you want, Billy?”

            The voice became layered as though many people were speaking and howling like the wind of a storm used to do through the beams of the ship. Hickey bends double and tries to block it out but again he can only cover one ear and it’s coming from within him as well as from without. A real, physical wind blows freezing air against him; a fog has rolled in. The moonlight makes it glimmer like a sheer silver curtain, and through it he sees dark figures, the hazy silhouettes of men, walking towards him in the distance, coming closer.

            “This is a trick,” he hisses. “This is a dream. You think ghosts scare me, Billy?” He laughs, hoarse and unhinged. “Think again. You’ll have to try a lot harder than that.”

            _I’ll haunt you,_ the voice says, sounding more miserable than vengeful. _I’ll haunt you till the day you die. You’ll get no rest, know no peace._

            Hickey sags and sinks down on the rocks, sits before his knees can buckle. He hugs his legs to his chest. “Good,” he says. “I hope you do.”

_You do?_

            “You must not be real,” he says, his certainty of that fact making him feel foolish and disappointed. “I don’t think you can surprise ghosts. Of course I do. Go right ahead.”

            _You miss me?_

 _  
_             Hickey laughs again. “You could say that. I wish this was real, Billy. I wish you really were here to torment me from beyond the grave. That’d be…well, damn heroic. Most heroic thing you’d have ever done.”

            _But I am real,_ Billy says. _Listen, you selfish prick, you dirty lying rotter, I’m right next to you._

            There is the undeniable noise of someone whistling, right beside his ear, someone blowing cold air right into his ear, and Hickey yelps, leaps to his feet, whirls around, but there’s no one, and the figures have vanished, and the ringing in his head is gone. Even the fog is thinning. The only thing breaking up the gray landscape, craggy and strange as the surface of the moon, is Goodsir standing in the tent, holding the flap back and staring.

            Hickey pants, his heart pounding wildly. “Did you hear something?” he says.

            Goodsir slowly shakes his head. “No. Did…you?”

            Hickey looks around one more time to be sure. There’s nothing. Nothing. He needs to get a grip. He squeezes his nails against his palm until they bite into the flesh.

            “’S nothing,” he says. “Wind.”

            Goodsir nods, looking wary. “You were talking to yourself, you know.”

            “Was I?” Hickey says, wrapping his arm around himself. He’s shivering all of a sudden. He’d hardly been aware of the cold while the voice was in his ear. Now it stung. “Must’ve been a dream, or something. Sleepwalking.”

            “Sleepwalking.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well…alright,” says Goodsir. “But you should come back in, you’ll freeze.”

            Like a doting grandmother, that one. It'd be funny if Hickey weren't so rattled. Hickey pushes past him back into the tent and sits on his cot, stares blankly at his knees. Goodsir sits opposite him and shifts restlessly, fidgets with his sheets.

            “Do you want to talk about it?” Goodsir asks.

            Hickey would have sneered, before, at the cringing, earnest question, the tone that suggested Goodsir would really rather not ask but felt obligated too, because he was just that generous, though he knew he’d regret it. Now it was just sad. The man really had nothing, if he needed to extend that courtesy to Hickey of all people.

            So Hickey just looks up at him and decides his best and only bet is to lay all his cards on the table. “What is the plan?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean, what’re we doing, Mr. Goodsir?”

            Goodsir blinks. “Well…isn’t it obvious?”

            Hickey clenches his fist in the sheets and takes a deep breath, smiles. Smiling when he’s irritated has become an automatic reflex. Keep everything smoothed over, never hint you’re reaching the edge, pleasantries will get you far in life.

            “No, Mr. Goodsir, it’s not. It seems we’re doing a whole lot of nothing. Just sitting around, staring at the ice. Meanwhile we’re eating through our food supply with no means yet of replenishing it.”

            “Well…yes, Mr. Hickey,” says Goodsir, blinking, thoroughly astonished though his expression remains bland as usual. “What else is there?”

            Hickey laughs, another reflex to cover up a less pleasant reaction, though it comes out a little hysterical. “You mean that’s—that’s it? We’ve been waiting around to, what, run out of food and starve, or freeze?”

            “Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know we’ll be around long enough for that. It could be any day now, really.”

            Hickey splutters. “No—no, it couldn’t be!” He scoots forward on the cot and leans towards Goodsir, who leans away. Hickey barrels onward, undeterred. “Listen, Mr. Goodsir. I know things seem a little bleak, but we’ve got more going for us than you might realize.”

            Goodsir’s eyes widen and he gapes. “Going for us—what’ve we got going for us? Everyone is dead, some directly because of you. Everyone else is gone.”

            “Get a hold of yourself. That doesn’t mean we’ve got to die.”

            “No, but it means we really should’ve.”

            “And yet,” Hickey says, smiling and spreading his arm. “Here we are, alive. And with pounds of fresh meat. Which means we’ll soon be stronger than we’ve been in months. And between just the two of us, it can stretch a long way.”

            “Stronger? Stronger? You’re missing a third of your tongue and an arm!”

            Hickey shrugs. “I’ll make do. Seems to me you’ve done a good job patching me up. Between the two of us, I figure we’ve got decent enough odds. It’s been bleaker.”

            “You’re sick. You’re out of your mind,” Goodsir says, shaking his head and sounding despondent. “If only you could understand…things really couldn’t get any bleaker, Mr. Hickey.”

            “We could be starving.”

            Goodsir just stares at him, stares deeply. It makes Hickey want to squirm. He forces himself to sit still and give no sign of his discomfort.

            “Do you really mean the things you say?” Goodsir asks. “Or is it all a bluff? Deep down, do you understand…understand at all, what you’ve done, what’s happened here, _is_ happening, to us?”

            “I’ve done what I had to do. I’ve gathered information, I’ve weighed my options, and I’ve reacted to bad situations as best I can. I’ve made do.”

            “But don’t you know that’s not the point? Don’t you see, please try, I need to know if you can at least try, to see that it doesn’t matter anymore? Sometimes it’s not…sometimes there are things we should not do, Mr. Hickey, even when we’ve been wronged, by men or nature. There are options that should remain…just as thoughts. I can’t blame a man for his thoughts. But you…you I don’t understand.”

            Hickey leans back and regards Goodsir with a keen, curious gaze. “You and I are two very different kinds of men,” he says. “Nothing is sacred, Mr. Goodsir. Absolutely nothing. Life is a nasty piece of work. It’s short, it’s cruel, you can’t ever trust anybody. They’re all acting in their self-interest, they’ll cut you off at the knees soon as they get the chance. You do what you must.”

            “That’s…that’s just not so,” Goodsir says, shaking his head. “You’ve seen the evidence that it’s not. There were good men on this expedition, Mr. Hickey. Honest men.”

            “Dead men.”

            “Survival is not everything. Not when the cost is so dear.”

            Hickey smiles, amused. “There’s just about nothing else, Mr. Goodsir. Not much else at all.”

            “You’re a murderer.”

            “There are some things you and I will never see eye to eye on. That’s alright, we don’t have to agree. But I won’t wait around to die, and neither should you. There’s no need. The monster’s dead, we can walk freely. Either back to the ships, see how they’ve fared, or carry on as the captain was doing. I won’t go back to England, but if I’ve got no choice but to take a detour, so be it.”

            Goodsir sighed. “It’s late. I don’t want to talk about this now.”

            Hickey nodded. “Alright, it can wait. But do think about it, Mr. Goodsir. I won’t forget.”

            “Why did you kill Lieutenant Irving?”

            The change of topic is abrupt, but Hickey isn’t so easily caught off guard. “Be careful what you ask, Mr. Goodsir. I’ll answer honestly now, and you might not like it.”

            “I don’t expect that I will. Still. I’d like to know.”

            “Well, let’s see…I could give you so many reasons. He patronized me. His death was strategic, see, ‘cause the ruckus stirred up the men, they got themselves armed, which I needed. He had me flogged, also.”

            “You were punished because you abducted Lady Silence.”

            Hickey shakes his head and smiles. “The other men were lashed for that insubordination. On the backs, if you recall. Not so with me. I had a couple extra charges tacked on there, thanks to Mr. Irving.”

            “Oh.”

            “He caught me in a compromising position, see. And his fragile sensi…” He starts stumbling, his mouth is aching from all the talking, the most he’s done since waking up here, and that’s entirely more sibilants than his stunted tongue, seizing up like an overworked muscle, feels capable of producing. He smiles and laughs under his breath. “Well, he was so offended he couldn’t keep it to himself. Told the captains.”

            “Oh, alright. Well, that makes perfect sense then,” said Goodsir, dryly. “Of course, so you had to kill and mutilate him, yes, that about squares it right up.”

            Hickey smiles. “Nah, it wasn’t that. That was a bonus. I needed the guns, I didn’t want those Esquimaux muddling things up, giving everybody false hope of rescue, getting excited over a single bag of meat, dragging us all back to England. But it helped that I just didn’t like him much. Never did. He made me sick. He ruined the only nice thing I—”

            Here he breaks off, smiles again, not a nice smile. “But that’s enough talk.”

            “Yes. Yes, I think it is,” Goodsir murmurs. He looks pale and stricken, turns slowly away from Hickey and lies down on his side, facing the tent.

            Hickey watches him for a while and thinks, _he really must not have a care, keeping me around, sleeping in the same tent._

            But that’s alright. If Goodsir can’t muster up the will to live, Hickey has enough for the both of them, and he likes having a personal doctor, it flatters him. He needs Goodsir, Goodsir is vital, so Goodsir will live. It’s that simple. Hickey lies down and despite the pain and the cold and the fact that they’re still hopelessly lost, he feels better, feels like he gained a bit of control, and that’s all he needs, inch by inch, he’ll get them out of this, he’ll crawl all the way if he has to. Survival only masqueraded as polite back in England. It always punched below the belt. It demands everything, and the price must be paid for it in full. Hickey has paid and paid and damn if he won’t reap the reward, he’ll tunnel his own Northwest Passage with a pickaxe if that’s what it takes to get off this damn hunk of ice.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Howdy and welcome to another 5k of 90% talking and 10% moody scene descriptions.
> 
> Thank you so much to all of you for reading, you've been very supportive! For as small as our Terror fanbase is, you guys are some of the most engaged people I've had the pleasure of writing for on here, which is really great. I've been enjoying many of your fics as well. Also, thank you for graciously going along with my cherry-picking of canon events as far as everything after Goodsir's death goes.
> 
> This story has kind've gotten away from me and I'll probably need to tack another one or two chapters on depending on how many words I feel is fair to pack into each one. But I know where I'd like to end it so we will get there eventually if Hickey will ever shut up and stop monologuing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last...someone other than these two buffoons enters this fic.

            As the both of them grow stronger, it becomes clear that there are some things they’ve failed to deal with. For Goodsir’s part, that’s…well, most things, really. He thinks a lot about Lady Silence, about how she left, about Captain Crozier’s empty promise that she was safe and among her people. He hopes she is alright. He hopes it more than he hopes for anything else. He thinks about her strong, graceful hands and her keen, bright eyes and how kind her smiles could be and he aches with love, he wants nothing but for her to be safe and in good company.

            He accepts that he is not part of that equation. He is glad she is not here. Here is a grave waiting to be filled with bodies. No place for she who is so full of life despite how they have devastated her and her home.

            It’s been somewhere in the range of four weeks, spent in varying degrees of consciousness and lucidity on both their parts, and somehow it seems like Hickey has just realized he is missing a limb. Goodsir sits by the fire holding his tin of warm water and watches the other man struggling with his clothes, waiting for him to boil over in frustration, expecting a tantrum.

            He doesn’t get one. Hickey frowns, he grunts and sighs, but does not try to hurt himself or break anything, shows no signs of wrath. He seems like a man handed a very major inconvenience who is nonetheless determined to go about his business as usual. Goodsir watches him twist his layers of clothes this way and that, figuring out the easiest way to get them on. Buttons aren’t much of a problem on their own, except for the fact that his fingers are stiff from cold. He gets them done up on his shirt with only minor fumbling. The clasps and straps and bracers give him more trouble; he forgoes most of the trappings and just starts tossing on layers. He doesn’t even attempt to do up any ties or knots.

            Goodsir doesn’t feel at all odd about watching this spectacle. They are far beyond modesty. There hasn’t been privacy since they boarded the ship, not for anybody without a substantial rank anyway. And Hickey’s hardly hiding. They aren’t exactly at ease around each other, but they don’t have a whole lot of reason or excess energy left to antagonize each other. It’s a tense truce. Goodsir cleans and inspects Hickey's wounds to keep him from infection and to keep himself from something worse, insanity maybe, or despair, which may be the same now. Hickey keeps Goodsir from sitting in one spot all day and staring at the ice until he goes sunblind.

            When Hickey gets to his gloves he just stares down for a long moment at the pair of them lying on the cot. He picks one up, flops it around, drops it again. He slides his fingers inside it while it’s lying on the cot, spreads them, then drags it down his wrist with his teeth until it’s fitted roughly over his fingers. He flexes them and smiles faintly.

            Goodsir resists the urge to clap.

            He spends his mornings quietly. He sits by the fire and drinks warm water and eats very slowly. He enjoys an hour of reflection and peace.

            Hickey, on the other hand, is operating on an entirely different wavelength from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep again. It’s like someone took the dial for natural human awareness and cranked it up to dangerous levels; he’s always concentrating on something, fiercely attuned to the world around him. His senses are on such a high frequency that Goodsir starts to notice he reacts oddly to slight sounds, is always cataloging his surroundings.

            Goodsir is no fool. He knows what a childhood spent tiptoeing across glass looks like in a grown man; how finely tuned the alarm bells get, how every movement or sound is cause to tense up, how the wary, constantly watchful gaze is like a thermometer gauging each situation.

            On this particular morning Hickey has apparently decided to go through the other tents. He brings what he wants out of each of them and dumps it in a pile inside the tent they’ve been sleeping in. Blankets, coats, spare shirts and trousers, mostly. He drags a small bag over to the fire and flops down on the rocks a few feet from Goodsir, begins pulling objects out of it. Folded clothes, a very faded book that may be a Bible or a journal.

            “Why are you getting all those clothes out?” Goodsir asks.

            “Need to start going through supplies, seeing what we have."

            “Yours are well-mended."

            Hickey shrugs. “I picked up a little sewing. All the men could do it.”

            “Did you do that?” Goodsir asks, pointing at the scrap of cloth Hickey has taken from the bag. It looks torn from a coat. It’s embroidered with small designs. The patterns have a certain endearing clumsiness about them.

            “No. Gibson did,” Hickey says.

            “Oh,” says Goodsir, and yes, he recognizes them now, the clothes Hickey has pulled from the bag. The blood stain on the back of the shirt. “You kept his things.”

            Hickey nods. “No point in throwing out good clothes.”

            Hickey seems to forget himself for a moment then, or at least to forget that he’s not alone. Maybe he just doesn’t care. He runs his thumb over the swirling stitches again and again, as though hypnotizing himself. His eyes go unfocused; he seems to listen to something Goodsir can’t hear. He turns away, and Goodsir watches over his shoulder as he folds the clothes and puts them back in the bag. He hesitates with the shirt, smoothing the collar down compulsively, as he’d done with the scrap of cloth, and then slowly brings it to his face, holds it over his mouth and nose and breaths. He sits like that for a second and then puts it back in the bag.

            When he turns around there’s no indication on his face that he’s just done anything strange. He says, “How much longer d’you think the food’ll last?”

            Goodsir can only shrug.

            Hickey sighs and goes back to pilfering the clothes and blankets of the dead men, piling them in their tent into a nest. Goodsir makes no comment when he divides the extra fabric evenly between them, heaping as many blankets on Goodsir’s cot as he does his own.

 

            The stronger Hickey gets, the greater a challenge it is to keep him from hurting himself. The man can’t be idle. He aggravates the wound on the base of his arm which had been healing so wonderfully until he got the bright idea to ignore all of Goodsir’s advice and start using the stump to lift and hold things down. So now he’s sat back on the table, shirt rolled up to the shoulder and wincing as Goodsir inspects the red, inflamed end of his arm. The muscle is warped around where it was amputated, the scar tissue angry and raised. Goodsir had done as best he could, better than he’d thought himself capable of even, but still, conditions such as theirs were not conducive to neat, pretty healing.

            Hickey didn’t seem to mind. He stared with morbid fascination at his arm while Goodsir rubbed a salve over it. He wears the glassy-eyed, deceptively indifferent look he gets when he's plotting.

            He sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth when Goodsir presses on the muscle.

            “Sorry,” says Goodsir.

            “You really are a saint,” Hickey says. “You’re still nice. I meant what I said on the ship, even if you did think it was empty flattery.”

            “Don’t."

            But Hickey never did know when to quit. “You’re helping me. You must think, deep down then, that I’ve got something to offer. You must know I’m right, and that together we’ve got everything we need to survive this.”

            “Stop talking, Mr. Hickey.”

            Hickey hums. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

            Goodsir looks up from the arm to Hickey’s face, which is smiling, then back. “No. No, I’ve never thought wounds ugly.”

            “It’s not really a wound. And you don’t have to be nice about it, I don’t care. It’s a disfigurement.”

            “Well, I never really thought those were ugly, either. All sorts of things can happen to the body. Illness, deformity—it’s all part of humanity, to me. Wellness is not the norm. It's the exception. It may not exist at all, at least not how we conceive of it.”

            “So we’ve—society, that is—has made a veneer, you mean? You mean to say that wellness, good health, the idea of the human body as sacred and beautiful when whole—all that’s a lie? A mask?” Hickey is smirking. Anybody else might take it for an encouraging smile. Goodsir knows better.

            “Maybe so. It’s certainly not the whole picture. A very small part of it, actually.”

            “And the body is quick to betray us, when pressed. When circumstances force it to give up the lie, and reveal it’s really just meat, breaks when you drop it, rots.”

            “I suppose,” said Goodsir, not liking the self-satisfied gleam in Hickey’s eyes at all.

            “Sort of likes ethics and morality, then.”

            Goodsir frowns. So that’s what he was getting to, in his roundabout way. “No. I see what you’re doing, but no, Mr. Hickey, I won’t play along. Like ethics, maybe, but not morality.”

            Hickey’s brow furrows. “And the difference is…?”

            “Not all the pretenses of society can be upheld here. The norms we observed, they stop making sense. But that doesn’t mean there is no longer a distinction between good and bad.”

            “I don’t see what you mean…I don’t see it like that. Good and bad. People made up those words. What’s bad for one is good for another.”

            “I think that you know, somewhere, that that’s not the case,” said Goodsir. “I think you know we’re talking about the sort of good and bad that runs a bit deeper than that. And if you don’t know, well…then I don’t think it can be imparted upon you. Sad, to think some men might be born not knowing, that they can’t be taught. I didn’t want to believe it was so. But you’re starting to convince me of that, at least, if not of anything else.”

            Hickey’s eyes widened, the light of some revelation washing over him. “Oh. That’s it. I’ve been wondering, why you’re helping me, I thought maybe…maybe you wanted something, maybe you knew you needed my help. But you pity me. That’s all.”

            “Don’t make me think about it,” Goodsir says, “or I just might change my mind.”

            Hickey smiles. “It’s too late. You can’t, Mr. Goodsir. You're awfully condescending, did you know that? I don't think you do. If you weren't so god-awfully nice, it'd make you a right bastard.” Abruptly he leans forward, his expression changing in a second to a conspiratorial look. “Do you know, when it bit me, it didn’t bite clean. The teeth weren’t sharp, I mean—they were blunt. It had a man’s teeth, Mr. Goodsir. It had to chew a little, to tear me apart. And then it choked on me. I think I killed it. But I felt—something getting tugged, like in here,” he says, pressing a hand to his chest. “All over, like it was pulling something out of me. It was horrible. It was wonderful, too, unlike anything else on Earth. And Tozer said he saw it eating Collins’ soul. What do you think of that, Mr. Goodsir? You spoke to Lady Silence more than anybody. You’re a man of medicine. Surely you can tell me, if such a thing is possible?”

            Goodsir leans back. “I don’t know. That’s most certainly…I mean, it could very well be part of the local spirituality, but whether that’s physically possible, I don’t…I don’t know.”

            “But do _you_ think there’s a soul?”

            Hickey’s gaze unnerved him. At some point he’d gone from sly and even playful to intense, as though the answer mattered deeply to him.

            “I think that…that whatever constitutes the essence of a man is quite unknown to us, at present. We don’t know enough to identify where it’s located, if it’s a function of the mind, the brain, or something else, or how such an essence might continue on once separated from the body, in which medium…”

            “But what does your gut tell you?”  
            Hickey’s gaze like two twin knives cut into him and pried the truth from him. Goodsir felt the melancholy he’d often been given to before the expedition, a general malaise that had no direct cause and hung about him like smoke, rise up. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’d like very much to believe that. I’ve tried very hard, I’m still trying. But I doubt too much for it to stick. I can’t say I really believe any such thing.”

            Hickey leaned back, satisfied. “That’s interesting.”

            “Is it?”

            Hickey nods. “But recent events haven’t changed your mind at all? You really don’t think there could be any such thing?”

            “I’ve told you, I just don’t know. What…was your intention, with the Tuunbaq, Mr. Hickey? Why did you imitate Lady Silence and her father?”

            Hickey hums. “It’s the Tuunbaq that’s on my mind as well. I thought I might be able to control it, make it leave us alone.”

            “But why would you think that?”

            “I guessed removing the tongue might be how Lady Silence was doing it.”

            “But…but you had no reason to think she controlled it.”

            “Didn’t I, though? She and her people must have a way, or else it’d be after them all the time, right?”

            “Well…no. No, from what little she told me about it, its existence had to do with balance. This is her home, her people aren’t invaders here, they don’t disrupt things the way we do.”

            “Neat little theory. Too bad we’ll never know,” Hickey says. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. I was wrong. Or maybe it just didn’t like me.” He shrugs. “But Mr. Goodsir, that thing…that thing took something out of me. I’m sure of it. I felt it. Something I’ve never felt before. And then it let go, it choked, it died. Now, if it was just a bear, maybe its previous injuries just happened to get the best of it at that moment. Seems unlikely, but could be. But if it wasn’t just a bear…and I think you and I both know it wasn’t a normal animal, then the question of souls becomes important, doesn’t it? ‘Cause if Tozer’s right, it was eating them.”

            “I don’t know what to say about all of that, Mr. Hickey,” said Goodsir. He had the distinct impression that Hickey wasn’t saying the whole story, that there was more to his line of thinking than Goodsir knew. He had a thoughtful look in his eyes that could only mean trouble. “The Tuunbaq is dead. What’s still troubling you?”

            “Nothing,” Hickey murmurs. “It’s nothing.”

            It’s clearly something, but Goodsir doesn’t need to bother with every thought in Hickey’s head. He has plenty of his own.

            Though mostly he tries not to think, seeks to cultivate a tundra like the one outside in his mind.

 

            Morning. Again. Sunlight jagged on the snow and the white rocks. Everything grey and white; the sky, the land, the tents. Goodsir has lately taken to sketching and whittling in his spare time; the time not spent keeping the fire going, attempting to cook their meat, keeping Hickey from reopening his wounds and bleeding to death.

            He doesn’t know what he’s making; nothing, he suspects, just chipping away at a little piece of wood until it’s gone, perfecting different strokes with his knife. Hickey is standing some feet away, staring at the horizon, motionless. He tends to slip into trances, Goodsir has noted. He watches Hickey’s behavior as though compiling a case study. This would not have been his preferred subject, and whenever he catches himself doing it he tries to stop, but his mind is naturally observant and analytical, and there’s so little other stimulation he can’t help himself.

            He wishes he knew Lady Silence’s real name. He spends a lot of time thinking about things from her perspective, or trying to, at least, trying very hard, and often, he suspects, falling woefully short. Two boats full of loud, arrogant men who didn’t know the first thing about Arctic exploration or survival. Men who ate what she seemed not even to consider food out of foul-smelling tins, who were like babies, unable to hunt or fend for themselves, men who scared all the game away for miles. Men who, without even trying, brought destruction wherever they went, who killed her father out of foolishness and ignorance, who terrorized her home not out of any particular malice, but from negligence, which was worse somehow. Men who didn’t care enough not to destroy. Men who fell upon each other quickly, who fought among themselves, killed and mutilated and ate each other because they’d fouled up the land and the relationships they should have been fostering, that would have otherwise provided for them.      

            And then men like Hickey, who were malicious, who had her Netsilik friends killed as if it were nothing, as if they weren’t people, just tinder for him to burn.

            Wrath overwhelms Goodsir as he stares at Hickey’s back. He is bowled over by the force of the emotion; he’s been numb for a long while now, and even before he’d not been given to such anger. Suddenly it is in every part of him, he is made of rage; everything from the slope of Hickey’s shoulders to Fitzjames’ boots on his feet to the shape of his profile is hateful, provokes a deep loathing, a tremendous repulsion. He hates the sound of the man’s voice, his snide grin, his calculating gaze. Even the color of his eyes is loathsome.

            It takes his breath away. He has never hated another human being before.

            Hickey turns around and starts walking back towards Goodsir and the fire, and suddenly the wrath evaporates, leaving him empty and wrung-out, tired and violated as if he’s just performed some momentous labor. Goodsir feels dirty and ashamed and frightened of himself. He doesn’t want to ever feel that again, not about anybody, not even Hickey, Hickey who doesn’t deserve even an ounce of his feelings, who he can’t let poison him with hatred. He wonders if this is how Hickey felt about Irving, if he’d felt it while he killed the other man, and what that must have been like, how blinding whatever emotion that produced must have been.

            Goodsir cuts that train of thought off and takes a deep, shuddering breath. Feeling himself about to spiral, he focuses his attention on his lump of wood, on carving clean lines into it. _Just thoughts,_ he tells himself. _Just thoughts, that’s all, it doesn’t mean anything, all men have such thoughts, the trick is not to entertain them, not to indulge, to recognize they are wrong, that I can’t help them, they don’t come from me, that’s not who I am._

            He is tired and hollow again. He doesn’t have enough kindling left to sustain such bouts of emotion for long.

            But the wrath has knocked something loose. He’d accepted Hickey’s brief recounting of events without question because it hadn’t mattered if the man lied; Goodsir had seen for himself, they were dead, if the man fudged details it wasn’t important.

            Now he wasn’t so sure.

 

            Convincing Hickey to do whatever Goodsir needs is shockingly, almost disturbingly easy. He knows the man too well, he finds. It was a side effect of his observational nature; Goodsir figured out how people worked quickly. He had just never tried putting that information to use for anything other than furthering his ability to help them.

            He must first begin by ignoring Hickey and putting on his heavy overcoat as if the other man isn’t there. Hickey watches him from his spot by the fire with bright, sharp eyes, casting sidelong glances at Goodsir so as not to appear as watchful. Goodsir pays him no mind. Hickey’s gazes become longer as Goodsir pulls on his gloves and hat.

            “What’re you doing?” Hickey asks.

            It is important, Goodsir finds, that he makes Hickey nervous or curious enough that he speaks first.

            “Just taking a walk,” Goodsir says.

            The skin around Hickey’s eyes and mouth tenses but he keeps his expression neutral. “Where to? Could go for a walk, myself.”

            “The Tuunbaq site.”

            Now Hickey’s calm falters. “Why for?” he says, leaning back in a poor attempt at nonchalance.

            “Well, I think I may have missed some valuables. I’ve been a little…I’ve not been thinking as clearly as I should be. Honestly, I thought we’d be dead by now. And we’re not, so…” He shrugs. “Time to go back and see what I missed.”

            Hickey scrambles to his feet. “Well, finally. I’ve been waiting for it to hit you, we aren’t dying out here. But there’s really no need to go back there. We might as well just go on ahead, make a decision, back to the ship or press forward. Why waste time?”

            “It won’t be wasted if it provides valuable supplies. I’m assuming you didn’t set out with an empty boat and the clothes on your backs,” he says, giving Hickey a meaningful look.

            Hickey scoffs. It’s absolutely uncanny, how easy it is to play him at his own game, tug the strings like a marionette. “Of course we had supplies. You think I didn’t plan ahead? We were setting things aside days in advance, storing it up.”

            “Then you must know our chances of success at either of your plans can only be helped by going back.”

            Hickey makes as if to cross his arms, then stops halfway. The awkward, aborted gesture only throws him further off balance. He grimaces. “You don’t think we’ve got enough here?”

            Now Goodsir knows he’s almost won; Hickey’s lost the upper hand, has just relinquished any authority by asking such a vulnerable question, deferring to Goodsir’s judgement on his own plots.

            Goodsir shakes his head. “No, I don’t. And remember, Mr. Hickey, if you’re so determined to continue surviving, it’s going to get colder. Think what sort of coat the pelt of the creature could provide.”

            Hickey shudders. “It’s bad enough we’re eating the damn thing, now you want to wear it?”

            But he’s walking towards Goodsir, and follows when Harry begins leading him back towards the abandoned boat and the bodies. He’s brought along what he needs to burn them. Now that he’s resigned to life he can no longer shirk the responsibilities that entails, particularly to his fallen crewmates. It’s shameful that he’s left them there as long as he has. He’s not been well. He knows this, but it doesn’t make him feel absolved.

            Something about Hickey’s comment bothers him. It’s not practical at all, his sudden discomfort about the Tuunbaq. It betrays what Goodsir had long suspected of lurking beneath the surface; a superstitious nature.

            “I suppose,” Goodsir says, picking his way carefully over the rocks, “that you’ve already worn it once. Why not a second time.”

            Hickey frowns. “How d’you mean?”

            “Well…how I found you. I had wondered about that,” Goodsir says. “How much, exactly, do you remember?”

            “I know it killed every one of the others to a man,” said Hickey. “Thought it’d done so to me, too. Saw it choking, dying…think I blacked out for a while. When I woke I was alone and the thing was dead, I was out of my head, wasn’t thinking straight at all, it’s…fuzzy.”

            “You were in its stomach,” Goodsir says.

            “Was I? Oh, right. Maybe I remember something like that. I was freezing. Never been cold like that before, not ever. Like my insides were icing over. Damn toasty inside that thing, though. Big bloody coat, you’re right.”

            Goodsir wrinkles his nose. They walk in silence for a while and cover the distance quickly, a much easier trek without having to pull a boat behind them. When they arrive, Hickey stops and Goodsir doesn’t press at first, stands beside him and looks at the carnage.

            “And you’re sure it killed everyone else?” Goodsir says.

            Hickey nods. “Damn sure. Most all before me.”

            Goodsir leaves him and begins gathering the bodies into a pile. Hodgson, Tozer, Manson…none bad men. Ordinary men who made a few poor choices out of desperation. Men made vulnerable by fear and illness, vulnerable to deception.

            On his first inspection of the site he knew he hadn’t seen Crozier’s body among the dead; he’d been so unwell himself from the blood loss and drugs that this hadn’t seemed to mean much. He’d even quite forgotten, and Hickey’s tale was that he’d personally seen the thing rip all the others apart. But now Goodsir is clearheaded, or at least relatively so, and it doesn’t make sense that there’s not a single remnant of Crozier. Could the creature really have devoured an entire man? Goodsir thinks not, especially not if it had perished as quickly as Hickey claimed after it maimed him. And yet nothing of Crozier remains, not a stich of fabric…

            Or maybe something does. Something Goodsir only notices when Hickey kicks the chain spilling from the creature’s mouth, making it rattle against the rocks. Goodsir’s eyes follow the grey links of metal winding through the grey rocks until his gaze rests on something at the end, something that breaks up the monochrome backdrop.

            A hand. A severed human hand, held captive by the chain.

            Goodsir swallows and steps closer. Hickey’s seen it also and is staring with a detached curiosity, his eyes unfocused, as though he’s trying to recall something.

            “And you’re quite sure…quite sure you saw Crozier die?” Goodsir says.

            Hickey nods. “I’m sure he’s dead.”

            “You saw him die, Mr. Hickey?”

            “Well—it got me before it finished him off,” Hickey says. “But he was chained to the others, he would’ve been stuck to it. Saw it swipe him across the face.”

            Goodsir crouches down. Of course it’s no definitive identification, he can’t prove anything, but he’s certain that it’s Crozier’s hand. “And yet this is all that remains,” he says.

            He is acutely aware in a way he has not been lately that he is alone with the company of a pathological liar, a violent opportunist. The back of his neck and the flesh between his shoulder blades tingles; he quickly looks up and straightens, reflexively making himself less vulnerable. Hickey hasn’t moved, shows no indication that he is plotting something untoward, but Goodsir knows better than to trust his apparent docility.

            “So, the thing ate him,” Hickey says, shrugging.

            Goodsir shakes his head. “This is a clean cut. The hand was severed with a tool. A human did this. He may have even done it himself, to get free.”

            Hickey’s eyes narrow. “Don’t fall into wishful thinking, Mr. Goodsir. Your captain’s most definitely croaked, no doubt about it.”

            “I’d say the lack of a body is room for considerable doubt. Tell me again how it went, Mr. Hickey—did you or didn’t you actually see what happened to Captain Crozier? Did you see how this,” Goodsir says, nodding down at the hand, “came about?”

            Hickey smiles, gives a quiet, derisive snort of laughter, cuts his eyes away from Goodsir. “What is this, an interrogation? Here, you want to know what happened?” He looks back at Goodsir, and his entire bearing has changed yet again. He is calm and deathly serious. “That creature chose me, Mr. Goodsir. When I first saw it, when it looked at me, I saw…well, myself. Or what I might become, if I let this place shape me. I only see now that it was a mistake I made before. A mistake I made with the captain, when I thought he understood, understood there’s a certain order to things, a real order, underneath the nonsense hierarchy they’ve gone and forced us all into. Understood we were equals, he and I. I thought he might…help me? I don’t know. But he disappointed me, and I should’ve learned then what I know now, but I did it again with the Tuunbaq, I relied on something outside myself to validate what I already know. You pity me, Goodsir, but there’s no need. I didn’t lose anything to this beast. Nothing precious, anyway, because the only valuable thing you’ve got is life, and it’s dead and here I am, and that alone proves how very wrong I was. Yet another disappointment,” he says, shaking his head with a twisted, bitter smile.

            “So what happened, Mr. Goodsir? Well, I’ve learned, and I’ll not make the same mistake again. The captain is dead because he refused to adapt. Say he survived the Tuunbaq…cut his hand off at the wrist, staggered off somewhere to bleed out in the snow. It’s all the same end. You know that I’m right, because I’ve been watching you for a while now, and you…you know people. You’re not like most people, who just wait for their turn to talk about themselves. You listen. We’re alike in that sense. You know the captain wouldn’t make it on his own, without his beloved ship and his flock of men. He wouldn’t be willing to change to the degree required. Complete transformation,” Hickey said, and the bright light of lucidity that had been shining in his eyes turned up a notch so that rather than enlightened he was suddenly verging on manic.

            “Interesting theories, Mr. Hickey,” said Goodsir. And they were, or at least he found them to be so, but only because of what they revealed about Hickey himself; Hickey whose power lay in his complete honesty with himself, who knew all his own weaknesses, had one fatal flaw he was blind to—a yearning for an acceptance he would never receive. Everything he did, Goodsir suddenly knew, had betrayed him all along, through his warped affections—for they were affections, Goodsir wouldn’t argue otherwise, though he doubted very much their intentions. He cared for Gibson, feared and loathed Gibson’s potential dismissal, so he forced the man’s will to bend, he pressed him into a kind of servitude to keep him around. He cared for belonging, so he went to lengths to persuade men until they accepted his morality as truth, so that he would not be alone as desperation made him stranger and stranger. He cared most especially for the captain’s esteem. He longed to be petted and praised. The feral street animal, the ‘gammoning dog’ as Crozier had called him, would have just as soon been a lap dog had anybody given him the chance.

            “Theories? You know well they aren’t just—well.”

            Hickey stops speaking abruptly. He’s staring at something over Goodsir’s shoulder. Goodsir turns to stare at the horizon but without his glasses his eyes perceive the distance as a blurry pattern of periwinkle blue above mottled gray.

            Hickey swallows. He runs a hand over his hair, smoothing it down. Abruptly he turns and begins walking away, in the direction he’d been staring.

            “Where’re you going?” says Goodsir.

            “Stay there and quit fussing, I don’t need your help with everything,” Hickey says, his raised brows and quirked lips indication enough he wants Goodsir to believe he’s talking about relieving himself. He doesn’t believe that for a second.

            His disbelief must show on his face, because Hickey gives up the act. He goes tense and strides up to Goodsir. “Look over that ridge there. I think I see somebody.” Hickey points in the direction he wants Goodsir to look, but only briefly, all of him coiling up as if to make himself small, invisible to whoever it is he thinks he sees.

            Goodsir looks. Yes, that is movement. A bulky figure coming over a rolling hill, walking at an angle from them.

            His heart expands, the air he breaths is golden and gilds his tired lungs, the cold soothing rather than stinging them. It feels as though someone is inflating a balloon in his chest. The world is suddenly light and delicate, and he is afraid if he moves this moment will shatter, the figure will vanish. Careful, now, careful, he thinks, as though a wrong move could somehow make this solitary person into a mirage.

            He steps forward without meaning to, because he cannot help himself; the draw of another human being among all these miles of barren landscape is inescapable.

            “Wait,” Hickey hisses, grabbing his arm. “You don’t know who that is.”

            “What’s it matter, who it is?” Goodsir says, astounded.

            “They might not be friendly.”

            “Don’t be paranoid,” Goodsir snaps. “I’m going to call them over.”

            Hickey lets him go. There is a moment where they size each other up, each aware of what the other is doing. Goodsir is bigger, has all his limbs intact. But Hickey is tough and knows how to fight, knows where to punch or jab to render a man breathless, and he’s killed before.

            Goodsir only almost had.

            Pity they hadn’t eaten him. Then the whole lot of them would be out of their misery and they wouldn’t have to play out this ridiculous little scene.

            Goodsir tries not to dwell on the fact that he’d meant for his final action on Earth to go against everything he’d spent his life working towards; to kill as many as possible.

            Goodsir thinks he sees the turn happening in Hickey’s face, sees the moment approaching where the man will toss aside reason and leap at him, go for the throat with his teeth like a starving animal, but Goodsir jars him by sidestepping so that he is directly in between Hickey and the figure, looming right up before him, widening his stance.

            He belies this threatening posture with a calm, quiet voice. “Don’t do anything foolish, now. You stay right here, and I’ll see who it is and what they’re about, and no ill will come to you from them or me. I can only promise that if you keep a hold of yourself now and don’t do what you’re thinking of doing.”

            Hickey glowers but has taken a step back. His glare is poisonous, every muscle in his face sharp with hate. “Don’t hunt me,” he says. “You’ll both regret it.”

            Goodsir’s brow furrows. “Hunt you? Why would I—no. No, don’t you go running off. I really won’t hunt you, Hickey. I won’t look for you at all. Your best chance of survival is to sit right here and wait this out, because otherwise you really will be on your own, with wounds you’d better not try and tend to yourself.”

            “Just go,” Hickey says, practically spitting with rage. A mutinous, impotent rage he can do nothing about. He knows he’s trapped, he’s beginning to have some inkling that Goodsir is getting too good at Hickey’s own game, and it’s making his remarkable self-control falter.

            Goodsir walks backwards a few paces, long enough to be sure Hickey isn’t going to rush up at his retreating back. He waits for the man to clamber into the boat and sit down, staring Goodsir down with burning eyes. Then Goodsir turns and hurries across the loose rocks, practically running for the person in the distance who’s been drawing nearer all the while.

            It is not one of the men. At least, not one of theirs. The figure is dressed in heavy furs and is pulling a sled. Dark hair shining in the light. Now he is running, his feet flying over the rocks, his heart punching through his chest and soaring on ahead of him, not willing to wait for his cumbersome body, tugging him faster and faster. She hears him coming from far off, sliding clumsily on the rocks and panting like an aging racehorse. She drops her sled and turns, takes a hesitant step forward, and he can see on her face the moment she identifies him, and he sends a quick thanks to whomever might be listening that he does, sees her eyes widen and her mouth go slack, one hand coming up to stifle a noiseless gasp.

            He stops a few feet from Lady Silence, so overcome with his desire to catch up to her and his happiness that he doesn’t know what to do with himself next, doesn’t know what he’s allowed to do, what is right, and doesn’t care, could happily stand there staring at her, alive.

            She lowers her hand and smiles, and he smiles back, and there are tears on his face and he feels himself breaking, breaking slowly and thoroughly, his bones grinding themselves to powder and he will puddle at her feet and will be glad to do so, glad to dissolve into the air she breathes because now there is a bright spot in the world where before there had been nothing.

            She pulls him into her arms, loosely at first, and then holds him fiercely against her, and he hugs back, until he could swear he feels their hearts beating against each other, though of course such a thing is impossible through the many layers between them, but he doesn’t care, for here is a real, solid, warm human being, here is the woman he would die happy for if only he knew she were ok.

            And it is not ok, not judging by the way she is out here alone pulling a small sled of sparse belongings, and neither is he, sickly and grief-stricken to his core in a way that he thinks has harmed him far more than the physical deprivations, but for a moment none of it matters, for a moment the burden rises from both their shoulders, turns to fog, and they are light.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Alone, alone, all, all alone,  
> Alone on a wide wide sea!  
> And never a saint took pity on  
> My soul in agony. 
> 
> The many men, so beautiful!  
> And they all dead did lie:  
> And a thousand thousand slimy things  
> Lived on; and so did I."
> 
> "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now it's finished! Thank you so much to all of you for reading; it's been really fun writing and sharing this with you. I enjoyed writing this story so much, but now it's time for the end. As always, your comments and critique are welcome--I am trying to improve as a writer, and I still have a long ways to go, so any and all feedback is much appreciated! Feel free to chat with me on tumblr @stilitana.
> 
> [Here](https://8tracks.com/gapsie/to-those-who-come-after-us) is the link to the 8tracks mix I made to listen to while writing this, to set the mood, in case anyone's curious what one listens to for hours while writing something like this.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy the last chapter. Thanks again.

            The moment Hickey sees the far off figure he is sure there will be trouble. When Lady Silence comes close enough for him to recognize her, he knows things are coming to an end for him here. Time to stop waiting for Goodsir to come to his senses or give up his last ounce of will and surrender; now the man is cut off completely from Hickey’s influence. There will be no persuading now that she’s in the mix.

            He should have killed Goodsir while he had the chance.

            And yet…if he can play this very delicate situation to his favor, there may yet be something to gain from Lady Silence. It’s long been knowledge that granted him his edge, and it may still prove to be the thing that, if not saves, at least directs the course of his life.

            So he sits in the boat, every muscle tense to the point of trembling, and watches as they embrace. Goodsir’s back is to him, and she’s too far to clearly see her expression, but from the way they keep drawing apart to stare at each other and then grabbing each other close again, this is the sort of emotional outpouring he’s never quite felt the need for himself. It's maudlin, excessive, and horribly boring to behold.

            _He’ll leave you now, surely. You’d better get a head start. What’re you waiting for?_

            Hickey doesn’t even startle when Billy’s voice brushes like a fine wind through his ear canal. He can no longer tell if its source is within or outside himself.

            “You’ll see,” Hickey murmurs.

            Billy sighs. The sensation makes him shiver. _How could you possibly see an angle here?_

            “She knows about the Tuunbaq.”

            _Still obsessed with that thing? It’s dead, let it go. You’ll soon be headed that way yourself. You do know that, don’t you? Not even you could still deny it._

            “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re dead, not me. You can’t understand anymore.”

         _I never understood you, even while I was alive._

            “You understood all too well. It was you who first suggested mutiny, remember?”

            _Well, I’m sure you were guiding us all along to that idea._

            “No. No, give credit where it’s due. There were honest men and there were childish men on this expedition. All kinds knew where we were. Childish men fell back on the authority of their captain to protect them, as if the flag could bundle them up nice and warm. Honest men knew something had to be done if they were to live. I didn’t do that, Billy. It wasn't I who divided you all up and cast lots.”

            _I didn’t mean mutiny how you did it. Not like that._

            “Then how? You're either willing to pay the full price for survival or not. There’s no half measures.”

            _I paid for the survival of other men. You saw to that._

            “Would’ve happened either way. Would you believe it if I said that eating you wasn’t even a thought in my head, when I killed you? No. Only ending unnecessary suffering. The rest was what followed logically. Your death wasn't a sacrifice, just your body, and you didn't it anyway.”

            _And so, what, you’re just awfully misunderstood? That’s what you want us all to think?_

“No. It’s very simple. All I ever did—the only point was keeping warm.”

            _Keeping warm?_

            “Yes. That exactly.”

            _Yes. Alright, fine. I see that well enough. That's horrible._

            “Do you think maybe she’ll—”

            _This is your problem._ The voice that sounds very much like Billy is suddenly wrathful and loud in his head. _You deal with this, you’ll get no help from me or anybody._

            Then his ears pop, and ring for a moment, and he blinks himself back into awareness to find the two of them are ambling back in his direction.

            Hickey gets out of the boat and waits for them with his hands in his pockets, itching horribly for a smoke. He’d meant to bring one along. He’ll have to see if he can filch some tobacco from another man’s bag; he’s fresh out of his own and it’s making his skin feel tight and his nerves run hot and close to the surface.

            He watches Lady Silence closely as she approaches. She gives but one look at the Tuunbaq; a lingering gaze over all too soon, and his immediate thought is that she’s seen this before, she’s already had her reaction, processed its death. Then she sees the places where Goodsir has butchered the carcass and her eyes widen minutely; she looks from it to Goodsir in surprise, and the man blushes, honest to God, and stammers something intelligible until she shakes her head and he stops.

            Then she sees Hickey and stops in her tracks.

            He stares at her, meeting her steady gaze and giving a slight smirk.

            She looks him up and down first with faint confusion, then mounting horror, and that makes him swell with satisfaction; _yes, you should be horrified, it’s I that killed your monster._

            And then her face scrunches up and she begins to laugh. She laughs loudly, breathily, right in his face, and something about the extreme display from someone he’s come to think of as being like a statue, impassive and immoveable, is disturbing. He feels thrown off balance, frightened even, of what it means, her laughing at him like that.

            “What’s the matter with her?” he says to Goodsir, agitated. “Why’s she going on like that?”  
           

           “I—I don’t know.”

            “Well, tell her to stop, would you?”

            Goodsir shoots him a cold look, and Hickey presses his lips in a thin line. Right, so that's how it's to be from now on. There are sides again, and he's alone on his.

            Lady Silence stops laughing and regards him with wary curiosity. He stares right back, unwilling to be cowed, though his hand wants to tremble; he stuffs it into his pocket, which draws her attention to the missing appendage; she seems unsurprised, and a thought takes shape in his mind. He narrows his gaze.

            “Ask her if she’s not seen this before,” Hickey says, not moving his gaze from Lady Silence.

            “Wh—”

            “Just ask her,” Hickey snaps. He takes in a breath that whistles through his teeth and tries to smile; it turns out a sneer. His screens are faltering, and this makes his heart skip a beat; he is more naked and vulnerable without them than he would be if he were stripped naked and at the mercy of the arctic elements. Mask upon mask and then beneath the stark white skull.

            His nerves are frayed; he is achingly aware of everything, all his senses on alert, all of him spooling outwards and getting tangled up. He feels himself coming unhinged and bites down on the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood and recalls the bright, pure pain of the lash so that his mind will be clear and sharp again—he seeks that hollow place inside the heart of pain where there is utter clarity, and shakily grasps it, grapples with his composure.

            Goodsir is watching him closely. He turns and speaks to Lady Silence in his hesitant Inuktitut. She nods.

            Goodsir’s eyes widen and he asks her something else. Hickey catches Crozier’s name. She nods again and Goodsir’s eyes glaze over; he appears to be looking far into the distance, but his expression is vacant. Then he snaps back and repeats his former question, slowly, almost reluctantly. When she nods a second time, he looks stricken and odd; the look is one of profound grief shot through with joy, so that the overall effect is a sickening poignancy that turns Hickey’s stomach. Such open sentimentality is highly disagreeable, and he can well guess what it means before Goodsir even opens his mouth.

            “She’s been here before,” he says faintly, more to himself than to Hickey. “She says the captain is alive and with her people.”

            Then he commences with a rapid-fire, one-sided dialogue, pausing breathlessly now and then to await some nod or gesture on her part. Meanwhile Hickey’s mind races like a rat in a maze, knowing there must be some advantageous angle if only he can find it, some way to turn these events in his favor, or at least to escape what harm they might do him.

            _The captain’s a veteran and better navigator than you’ll ever be,_ says Billy. _Too bad he’ll never let you leave here. Not alive, anyway._

            “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            Goodsir shoots him a quick, irritated look before turning back to Lady Silence as though Hickey hadn’t spoken.

              _Maybe a hundred years hence someone’ll come and chisel you out of the ice, and you can go home in a box._

            “Quiet,” Hickey mutters, rubbing his temple. “’M thinking.”

            _You’re forgetting something. Your mind’s getting dull, Cornelius. You're sick. Just admit you’re lost._

            “Don’t be cryptic. Say what you mean or bugger off.”

            _Fine. If that’s how you like it. I would have reminded you, you know, if you’d for even just one second quit your pride and asked for my help._

            “Well, go on then, help. I’ve never been above asking for your help, what’re you on about?”

            _But above the men who grant it. You don’t ask—you bully and scheme until you get what you want._

            “Are all dead people moralizers, or just you? What is this, is Irving the one giving it to you on the other side, turning you into a bloody nag?” Hickey snaps.

            _Oh, don’t worry. He’s here, too. You’ll be seeing him soon enough._

            Then his ears pop again and the blood is rushing in his head; he feels dizzy and unbalanced.

            “Mr. Hickey?” Goodsir says. They’re both staring at him.

            He squares his shoulders and meets Goodsir’s gaze, his heart pounding. “Well?”

            “What was all that?”

            “Nothing,” Hickey says, furrowing his brow and tilting his head. “What d’you mean?”

            Goodsir laughs, an unkind, derisive snort. “That was a poor attempt, even for you.”

            “Just thinking aloud. What do you care? I expect the two of you’ll be going off to kiss Crozier’s boots now, so let’s agree to part ways here, shall we? Don’t bother me and I’ll not go anywhere near you, and we’ll be through with each other.”

            “Actually, no,” says Goodsir.

            “What?”

            “Because she was the shaman at the time of the Tuunbaq’s death, Lady Silence…well, it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what’s happened, but I’ve gathered she can’t return to her people. A banishment, of some kind. And I’ll hardly be leaving her on her own.”

            “Naturally,” Hickey mutters.

            Goodsir ignores this and continues. “So, you and I will go.”

            “What?”

            Goodsir raises his chin, determined not to gratify Hickey’s surprise. “Yes.”

            “Why?”

            Goodsir’s gaze cuts to Lady Silence just for a second, for less than a second, but Hickey catches the glance.

            “I see,” he says, speaking slowly. “Don’t want me alone with her. Just what do you think I am? You think I’d hurt her? What would be the point?”

            “I hardly dare imagine what you’re capable of.”

            Hickey is uncomfortable with this sudden acknowledgement of his nature. His ends were best served when those around him were entirely unaware of the depths to which he was capable of sinking. But Goodsir had him pegged wrong, or at least, not as accurately as the other man clearly thought. Hickey wasn’t a sadist. He’d not lay a finger on the woman now that he stood to gain nothing by it; sure, when an opportunity arose for him to get a little vengeance from his plans, that was all well and good, but he was far too pragmatic to put himself at risk for the sake of revenge alone. Revenge was indulgence in one’s pride, in one’s sense of honor, which he didn’t presume to have.

            “Well—I’d not do a thing to her, Mr. Goodsir. And anyway, I hardly could, could I? Don’t exactly have any help. You do her a disservice, thinking she couldn’t dispatch of me easily. If I’d gone by myself to kidnap her, I’d have gotten nothing more than a knife between the ribs for my trouble, I’ll tell you that much.”

            Goodsir bites his lip. He’s taken aback by the honesty; he mistrusts it and looks troubled as he tries to discern what Hickey’s angle is. There isn’t one, other than to perhaps lower the other man’s estimation of him, so that he might regain what meager benefits are conferred by being underestimated. It has served him well till now, his ability to slide along, unremarkable and unnoticed.

            “Even so,” Goodsir says. “We’ll all three go. Lady Silence will wait for us while we go in and find the captain, and you can—you should be glad, really.”

            “So I’m a prisoner?”

            Goodsir looks at him coolly. “You can’t really think you’ll ever leave this place, Mr. Hickey. Not still, surely. We’re both prisoners, in that sense.”

            “Not how I see it. No, there’s a way out of this yet. We just haven’t—”

            “If there were a way out—and there’s not—but if there were, do you really think I could allow you to leave? No. No, Mr. Hickey, not you, not any of us, not ever. We’re not…fit, any longer, to walk among the men back home. Forget that place, forget all other places. This is all the world for us now.”

            With tremendous effort, Hickey restrains himself from betraying how his blood has begun to boil. He must keep the rage and the hate off his face entirely, must be impassive, scornful, but not mutinous. So Goodsir, who would’ve taken it upon himself to be executioner had Hickey not heard his plot, would now like to play judge, too. Judge of who gets to leave, of who deserves to live. Well, Hickey’s bested far more fearsome men. He’ll best this one too, if he only keeps his wits about him and hides his intentions.

            Hickey smiles, looks down at the ground, and permits an amused, almost bashful expression to spread across his face. “Maybe so. But don’t expect that to be as palatable to me as it is you—you still think this place is beautiful, don’t you? I never did. I’d rather die warm.”

            “Well. That may be beyond us now.”

            Hickey sighs and allows a bitter, wistful note into his voice, gives a self-deprecating smile to Goodsir, clearly catching the other man off guard. “Ah, well. I can complain least of all, I guess—I lost the least, coming here. S’pose I wouldn’t have died any better back home. Cold there, too. Probably would’ve been raining, I would’ve been face down in a gutter or dumped in the river. At least the air here is fresh. I didn’t know how nice fresh air was, until coming here. I’ve not done too poorly. All in all, I’ve done well for myself, coming here, even if it is to die—better to die anywhere than there, free of that horrible country. I’ll never go back. So I’m free, and I’ve won.”

            Goodsir appears unsettled. His brow is scrunched, his lips loose and slightly parted, and beneath all the hair and sanctimonious attitude he might not have been a bad looking man altogether, it might have been fun, to have taken him apart more thoroughly, to have crawled far enough inside to wear his skin—but the time for that was over and done.

            “Who _were_ you?” Goodsir says.

            Hickey smiles and shrugs. “Nobody. And since it’s not my name on the roster, if anybody ever does find us, that’s how I’ll stay. I was no one and I had no one, so if you’re right, and this is the end, then very soon it will be just as if I’d never lived at all.”

            After all that's happened, Goodsir is unable to drum up any real sympathy; at least not any more he hasn't already spent on the rest who've died before them.

            “Well, maybe it’s best that way. The legacy you were creating may be better buried. And anyway, I’d imagine it’s less painful, leaving no one behind.”

            Hickey smiles wider, baring teeth. “Oh, yes. How blessed I am. To go to the grave entirely unknown by anyone...a gift, no doubt.”

            Goodsir winces. He turns away from Hickey and he and Lady Silence walk close together back towards the camp. Hickey waits until they’re some yards ahead before following behind.

 

 

 

            Seeing Lady Silence again, having her here beside him, is frightening. More so than when Goodsir could content himself with fantasies of her alive and far away, living peacefully among her people, forgetting in time about them and the misery they caused. Now she is here, banished, once more amid danger, and yet he is so selfishly glad it makes his heart beat fast and out of rhythm. He keeps glancing at her as they walk, convinced the next time he looks she will have vanished and turn out to have been a dream all along.

            Goodsir cannot fully relish his joy because it is surrounded by horror; the tension of this new dynamic is suffocating. He keeps one eye on Hickey and the other on her, sure that whatever comes of their further contact can only be more suffering. Hickey lags behind and seems preoccupied with his thoughts; there has long been a sharp, disjointed quality to his movements that has Goodsir on edge, makes the other man almost unworldly and strange; the anatomist is convinced that the other man’s mind, once undeniably clever and discerning, is beginning to go off the tracks—the first sign of this is of course the delusions of grandeur he’d apparently given into during the encounter with the Tuunbaq, but it hadn’t stopped there. Now he mumbles to himself, is constantly distracted and scattered. Watching him as closely as Goodsir has been, for lack of anything better to do, has revealed a fog creeping in, clouding his gaze, which will go unfocused for long moments, and then leave him disoriented; he looks around, blinking and momentarily seems at a loss as to where he is.

            For Lady Silence’s part, her reaction to Hickey is strange. She makes no attempt to hide her repulsion, but given what Hickey had done to her and to her friends, Goodsir might have expected a more extreme show of loathing, now that there are no other men around to stop her from seeking justice. Surely she knows Goodsir has her side in this, and in everything?

            No…no, she probably does not. After all, what’s he done to deserve her confidence?

            He touches her arm, lightly, to draw her attention. She looks at him softly, quizzically, and he melts—his heart and all finer feelings had been lead, he had hardened himself, but now she makes him ashamed of that, because she has suffered all the more, and yet remains capable of gentleness, did not resort to making herself callous to survive. He thinks now that this is what strength looks like—not hard-heartedness, the brutal view of humanity as a kind of reductive mathematics wherein any kind of cruelty is justifiable in the name of survival, but whatever flexible grace holds her upright, bends but does not break.

            “I hope…I don’t…”

            He gives a soft huff of dissatisfaction, his mastery of her language woefully inadequate for expressing anything remotely complex. But she is patient and waits for him to gather his thoughts.

            “I don’t know what this seems like, to you,” he finally says. “But I am not _with him._ I’m sorry. The truth is just that I…was weak. I couldn’t…I won’t lie to you, the truth is I needed him, to not be alone, or else…but I’m sorry.”

            Lady Silence’s brow furrows. She shakes her head.

            “I shouldn’t have helped him. Not after what he did to you, to your friends. To all of us. If I hadn’t kept him alive, I don’t know that I would’ve kept myself, but even then, maybe it would’ve been better—”

            She presses a finger over his lips, so softly he scarcely feels it, but the gesture immediately steals his breath and silences him. She shakes her head.

            Goodsir feels flooded with shame. So the thing he’d thought he should have done to prove his loyalty—indeed, even his love—that is, murder—is not something she ever expected, or desired, and he feels like a fool and a barbarian. Because surely, if she’d rescued Crozier, she knew that Hickey was also alive, and had not finished him herself—had not helped him, either, but had not taken it upon herself to determine another person’s life. Hickey’s spilled blood wouldn’t bring the others back. It would be a nasty little act, killing that man—not worth anyone’s time, not anymore.

            His eyes are burning, his throat grows tight. But he must try, at least, he owes her that—try to tell her what it is he means, this thing he’s been driving at all along, dancing around in his usual awkward, longwinded way, too much a coward to get to the heart of the thing directly.

            “When I thought you were far away, and happy,” he says, “I was glad. Not that you were far from me—but that, if that was where you were most safe, then—then it was good that you were there, and I wouldn’t want you anywhere else. And it would have been enough, to imagine you there. But, now—it’s terrible to be alone, I don’t want to think of you alone, and if you’d let me, if you’d want it—I would keep you company, if you’d like me to. I’d walk wherever, however far you want.”

            She smiles, wide and unabashed, and he has the feeling she’s laughing at him, but kindly, and fondly, and she again presses a finger lightly over his lips, and this time she nods, and he feels light, light, light, and dizzy, and can hardly believe his good fortune, that here at the end of one world he has found another, and it is blindingly beautiful, and he can only smile and laugh and feel gratitude even as it gouges out his eyes and smothers him.

 

            Goodsir and Hickey pack bags back at the camp. Goodsir lies his beside hers on the sled, and then joins her in pulling it. Again, Hickey trails behind as she leads them back to her old home. Goodsir is hesitant to let Hickey know the place, but Lady Silence seems unconcerned, and Goodsir supposes she knows better than him, knows that her people are more than capable of fending off one man armed with nothing but ill will.

            As they near their destination, Hickey speaks up for the first time during the trek.

            “Ask her what she thinks about ghosts,” he says. “Ask her if that thing ate souls, or what.”

            “I don’t think it’s our business to pry.”

            “Oh, for God’s sake, go to hell with that,” Hickey says, rolling his eyes. Goodsir almost winces; it’s laughable, and sad, really, that course language should still produce any effect at all on him, after this. How Hickey’s kept his vulgarity in check is a mystery to him; since he gave up on appearances, his language has sunk lower and lower. All part of the disguise, Goodsir supposes; cursing such as what he partakes in would’ve only betrayed all too much about his social standing.

            Goodsir explains as best he can to Lady Silence about Hickey’s new preoccupation with the supernatural. When he asks, falteringly, without outright saying it, if the Tuunbaq had done other than physical damage, she merely points at Hickey and then slashes one hand diagonally through the air.

            Hickey immediately blanches. “What’s that she’s doing?”

            “I don’t know. Calm down.”

            Hickey stops walking and stares at her, his narrowed eyes flashing with fear. “Is that—what, a curse?”

            “A curse?” Goodsir says, and can’t stop himself from guffawing.

            Hickey turns his glare on Goodsir. “Don’t laugh at me,” he hisses. “You’ve got no right, acting the man of science. It’s not superstition, not after what we’ve seen.”

            “It _is_ superstition, because it’s entirely unfounded. Tell me, did you also hold your breath when you went by graveyards, back home?”

            Hickey’s face is red—he makes no reply, ignores Goodsir entirely, in favor of glaring at Lady Silence, his body trembling. “You’ve done something,” he mutters. “I know you have. Are you the one holding them here? You’re so smug, acting like you spared me—but you’re getting yours, aren’t you, in the end, keeping us stuck here in this hell?”

            “That’s enough,” Goodsir snaps. “Don’t make ridiculous accusations, have you lost your mind?”

            “You’re just as bad,” Hickey says, but now he sounds morose rather than angry. He won’t look at either of them. “You’re in league. Ask her what that thing did to me, make her tell you what she’s done, then you’ll see.”

            “Unbelievable,” Goodsir mutters. “All that talk of practicality, but when you’re scared you go running to witchcraft for explanations? Typical, I suppose you’re no different from any other—”

            “Any other what? Go on—don’t pretend to be above judgement, you’re as condescending as the rest of your lot, I heard through the door the garbage you fed Young about angels and heaven, what a joke you made of that boy’s death—but that’s what you imagine comforts a dumb ship's mate who doesn't know better, isn’t it? A boy who can't hardly think, who’s got nothing in this world going for him so his only means of getting by is to imagine a load of frilly nonsense in the next?”

            “That’s enough,” Goodsir says, shaken. “I didn’t condescend that boy, I was sincere, but—but wait a moment, you mean—you are talking about the one whose ring you stole, aren’t you? The consumptive boy? And his name, you must tell me at once his name, I made him a promise, I tried to keep it, I must tell the captain, otherwise—”

            Hickey sneers. “You didn’t even remember his name?”

            Goodsir hangs his head, shakes it. “No. No, I forgot it almost at once. Or along the way, somewhere...either way, it’s gone.”

            “Let it stay gone. That sister of his was ill, she’s died coughing blood as well by now.”

            “Don’t mention him again,” Goodsir says quietly. “Don’t mention any of this again, to me. I won’t discuss it further with you.”

            He turns and resumes pulling the sled, feels Hickey’s gaze burning against the back of his neck.

 

            When they near her former home, Lady Silence stops and will walk no further. Goodsir does not understand this custom and wants to rebel against it—to insist that it is cruel, and wrong. But he knows he may not do so—it is not his place, and arguing against such cultural customs would be useless. It was cruel and wrong for them to hold her hostage, to give her father an improper death and burial. A tradition is not a thing to be changed in a day, nor in any of the days remaining to him. So he does not voice his feelings on the subject, merely nods and accepts her decision to remain outside, unseen.

            Hickey also digs his heels in. “I won't go any further,” he says. “You’ll have to knock me out and drag me, if you want me along so badly. Go on and find your captain, since you apparently can’t live without someone to grovel to. Leave me out of it. I won’t step foot in there.”

            “Don’t be dramatic. Just come along—none of them know you, they won’t harm you. It’s only ever you who’s harmed them, don’t you understand?”

            “I won’t go. I don’t know why you’re insisting. Look at her, and look at me—you don’t think she could knock me over if she wanted?” he says, seething. “If she screams, you’ll all hear and come running, and kill me. Why would I harm her, how would I even do it? You’ve got my knife, I’ve got nothing.”

            Lady Silence nods and gestures for Goodsir to go forward.

            He hesitates. He does believe that she could defend herself against Hickey, but…but the man is crafty, and increasingly unpredictable, and Goodsir has a premonition suddenly that he will never see the man again, is certain he looks upon Hickey for the last time. He scolds himself for this irrational thinking but can’t shake the heavy sense of finality.

            He can let it go unsaid no longer—no matter how monstrous the feeling may be, it remains nonetheless, and the thought that one of them might die before he says it frightens him—he must get it out into the world before that happens, for better or worse, he won’t rest until it’s done. Goodsir surges forward and grabs Hickey’s hand. The other man startles and makes to pull away reflexively, but stills when he meets Goodsir’s earnest, burning gaze.

            “I forgive you,” he says. “By God, I don’t know how, or if I have the right—but I forgive you everything. Everything.”

            Hickey’s face reveals a kind of terror. He appears disturbed and above all, confused, so overcome he forgets to try and free himself of Goodsir’s firm grip, gives only the most feeble struggle. “I don’t know what you’re saying—you’re mad. There’s nothing to forgive.”

            “It doesn’t matter—maybe you really don’t know—maybe you can’t, but that’s just sad, it doesn’t matter—I forgive you. Be calm now, won’t you? From now to the end, hold your peace? It won’t be long, surely you can.”

            Hickey regains his senses enough to wrench his hand free, and glowers. “Get going and get out of my face. You’ve lost your sense, you’re raving.”

            “Maybe I have, maybe—but all the same. Back home, the obstetrics, and others besides, all obsessed with this question of monsters, and if only they’d come here, they’d understand, it’s no such thing, not as they’ve conceived of it, there are only men—you must forgive them—that’s the only way…” Goodsir knows that he is babbling now, getting increasingly agitated and losing the thread of what he’d wanted to express, and maybe he is losing his mind, but it doesn’t matter. He’s said it, or all that he’s capable of saying, imperfect being that he is, so he leaves them there: Hickey visibly shaken and angered, Lady Silence steadfast with a glimmer in her eye that makes him feel she already knows all he could ever want to tell her.

 

            He walks into the village and raises his open palms like an apprehended criminal, unsure if the gesture of submission will register across cultures but compelled to try anyway. Two children peer at him, nudging each other forwards in jest, and then shuffling back again. A man approaches him at once. Goodsir tells him who he is and why he has come as plainly as he can, self-conscious of his poor articulation. He mentions Lady Silence only in passing, says he came across her and then departed, sensing it may be prudent not to draw her into this. He says he’s looking for another man like him, another stranger, and begins to describe Crozier, but the man stops him.

            He speaks slowly so that Goodsir can understand, but it is more difficult than it had been with Lady Silence, who knew the limitations of his vocabulary and possessed infinite patience. Nevertheless, with pounding heart and mounting excitement, Goodsir understands the man is already familiar with Crozier. The man tells him to wait; for several anxious moments Goodsir stands still and bears the staring of the two children and the eyes of other people through the flaps in their tents; then the man reappears and leads him inside.

            The tent is dimly lit and warm; warmer than he’s been since he can remember. He halts at the opening, standing hunched so as not to bump his head against the skins stretched taut over the poles, and stares across the round open area at a man bundled in fur—seal or caribou, he can’t be sure—a scruffy-faced man with pale hair and pale eyes. Goodsir's guide nods to this man and ducks back outside.

            Crozier rises, and just as the dour, somber expression on his face begins to soften, Goodsir can’t stop himself from stepping forward and, in a tremendous breach of protocol and in disregard for his dignity, draws the captain into an embrace which Crozier returns without delay, crushing Goodsir against himself, and making him feel whole and steady again, as if were it not for Crozier’s arms he would fly apart at the seams. He shakes; it takes him a moment to get ahold of himself, during which Crozier blessedly allows the embrace to continue so that Goodsir has time to arrange his features into a look less utterly shattered. When he draws away, the captain holds him at arm’s length and they stare at each other in amazement, giddy and grinning like much younger, less battered men.

            “I thought you had died,” Crozier murmurs, marveling at Goodsir, looking him up and down. “Hickey, that lying snake, I should’ve known better than to believe—but you’re alive.”

            “And you, too! Oh, captain, you couldn’t imagine—we thought we were the last—I shouldn’t have given up on you, but I did, I did, and I’m so sorry for it.”

            “Listen to me, Dr. Goodsir,” says Crozier, regaining his familiar seriousness. “Don’t be sorry—there’s no need. You’ve done admirably, from start to finish. There’s only the future now—how we proceed from here on out is all that can concern us. Only, tell me this—you said we, are there other men besides yourself?”

            Goodsir hesitates—not because he wants to hide this from the captain, but because he’s unsure how to put it, and how the other man will react. “There’s…it’s just me and Mr. Hickey, sir.”

            Crozier’s face becomes grave. Then, so unexpectedly it takes Goodsir aback, the tiniest wry smile curls the ends of Crozier’s lips. “Of course—Lord knows how he did it, after what had happened the last time I saw him—but of course it would be he who survives.”

            “I…may have had a hand in it, sir. I found him. When I woke, I went looking for you—but all the others were dead, it was just him, and I couldn’t leave him, not if I’d tried, and it was my sincere belief that the both of us would be dead any day, we were in horrible shape, and I don’t think I can say I’d have made it had I not had someone else, even him.”

            “Slow down, Dr. Goodsir. It’s alright, there’s no need for you to explain your actions to me. You’ve nothing to fear.”

            “Sir, I…I nursed a murderer back to health. A mutinous, violent man, who I know without a doubt would be violent again, without hesitation, if it suited his purposes. And I did it out of weakness, and sickness of spirit—I’d despaired of everything, all hope and salvation. I _should_ apologize.”

            “For saving a life? For saving your own, as well? For being a man, Dr. Goodsir, and a good man at that, and a good doctor besides? No—don’t apologize to me for any of that. If your maker asks it of you, then I suppose you’ll have to go ahead, but as for me, I don’t see how anyone could dare demand it of you.”

            “I had the gall to forgive him.”

            “The gall to forgive!” Crozier says, and laughs. “What a phrase, Dr. Goodsir. The gall indeed—maybe if more of us had it, we’d not be here. Of course, it’s you who understands it best…I should be apologizing to you, and to many more besides, but you’re all that’s left.”

            “And for what, sir!”

            “Do you know, when I came here, I made no mystery of the role I’d played in the death of the Tuunbaq. This creature that was sacred to them—the creature that kept the balance. Not only that, but my men, my expedition, had scared all the overland game away—these people were suffering greatly for our blunders. And what did they do? They took me in completely—fed and clothed me, housed me, kept me warm and in good company. That was the radical character of their forgiveness. I did not earn it. Just as Mr. Hickey did not, and cannot, earn yours. Nonetheless, it’s given. And I think you understand this way of thinking, even if it might take you some time to accept it, because it was you who understood Lady Silence back, and I didn't listen, and for that I owe everyone an apology, for had we taken your tack from the beginning, and treated her kindly, treated her as a fellow human being who was frightened and alone, maybe things would have happened very differently. But all that’s far behind us.”

            “I don’t know what to say. I still can’t believe it’s really you. And…and there were no others?”

            “No. Not a one.”

            Goodsir hangs his head. “What now?”

            “Well, that’s up to you. I for one have decided to remain, and to make no effort to return to England, and if it tries to find me, I intend to evade it. But you must do what you wish. I won’t give you or anyone else another order. I lost my ships, and my men—I won’t leave them now. But should help ever come—should there be an opportunity—you feel free to seize it. I only ask you make no mention of me—tell them I am dead, and not to come looking.”

            “I don’t think I’ll be leaving this place either, sir. I don’t…I don’t know that I could. I feel unfit now, for anywhere else, and…and I did mean what I said. It _is_ beautiful here.”

             “And you’ve found Silna?”

            “Silna?”

            Crozier’s eyes glitter. “The true name of Lady Silence, Dr. Goodsir.”

            Goodsir’s eyes widen. “Silna,” he mouths, noiselessly—then again, aloud. “Silna. Silna! Yes! We found each other—and that’s why I can’t stay, captain, I’ve promised her my company.”

            “That’s good. I couldn’t be more glad, hearing that. In time, who knows, the two of you might yet find another settlement, where the people will welcome her.”

            “You really think so?”

            “I can’t say. But it’s a broad country, Dr. Goodsir, and we’ve not seen but a tenth.”

            “And…and what about Mr. Hickey? He’s determined to find a way out of here, but I can’t bear the thought of him out there in the world again, after all this—and he’s ill, captain, he won’t admit it, but he’s very unwell.”

            “My advice is only this: do what you must in regards to Mr. Hickey, but do not let him spoil what peace or happiness you might find here. His kind is harmful only in so far as there are people around him to manipulate, and there are none left. The classes have dwindled along with our ranks—the tensions between them were his ammunition, and it’s gone—what remains of it here is only harbored within himself. He is not your charge, Dr. Goodsir. His case is not what you were put on this Earth to shepherd. Let him go his way, and you go yours, and don’t worry about what will become of him. There will always be men like him—but the story of that kind of man is finished in this part of the world, for now, until, god forbid, we send more.”

            Goodsir nods. He is not entirely settled with this advice, but knows he has much time to reflect on it. “And…what about you, sir?”

            “I like it here—I’ll stay for as long as they continue to have me. I've made what peace I can with life.”

            “And you…forgive me, sir, but you…are not unhappy here, are you?”

            Crozier laughs. “You can speak plainly, Dr. Goodsir. No, I am not unhappy. I’m a melancholy old man, and I’m afraid there wouldn’t be room for the amount of reflection I do anywhere else—I’d feel crowded. I am not unhappy, no.”

            “That’s good. That’s very good, sir. Maybe…maybe we’ll see each other again, before all is through.”

            “I should very much hope so. You’re among the best men I’ve known, and if you’ll allow me to say so, a dear friend now. But if we do not—I wish you well, and want you to know you have my admiration and respect.”

             Goodsir is speechless. His eyes burn, but he is not afraid of showing tears in front of the captain—he knows his emotion will not be mocked, will be understand completely. Unable to speak, for his throat was closed on a sob, he simply nods.

 

 

 

            Hickey stares at Silna with a caution that borders on fear. He respects her—has always respected her, in the impersonal way one respects the forces of nature, for what he mistook for her control over the Tuunbaq. She seems disinterested in him, only taking enough notice so as to be aware of any sudden movements on his part.

            “I think you can understand me,” he says at last. “I think you know more of what we say than you let on.” 

           She merely stares.

            He narrows his eyes. “You know what that thing did to me, don’t you? You know it—it took something, from me. It took it out of here,” he says, pressing his hand to his chest and tapping it. “Not this,” he says, pointing at his halved arm and shaking his head. “Here.” He again presses his chest and watches as she slowly nods. His heart quickens. “Yes—see, you understand, you know, it did something to us—to all the men it killed—only it didn’t finish with me, so whatever it did, it only got halfway, and I think—do you know, if it’s possible, that what it did puts me—halfway here, half somewhere else? Is that why I can—hear them, sometimes? I’m not losing my mind, I know that’s not it, I can still think. But I have to know what it did, and how long I can go living with it, or if it’ll kill me yet.”

            Silna nods again, her expression unchanging, and he scowls. “Do you understand, or are you just nodding so I’ll be quiet?”

            She nods.

            Hickey steps back. He can’t stand to be near her for another second. Goodsir’s a doe-eyed fool, and it’s clear he’d follow her off the edge of a cliff. Well, Hickey’s no fool, and he won’t be party any longer to her and whatever force here has maimed him.

            “I’m leaving,” he says, pointing away from the village. “I’m going. By myself. Away.”

            She just stares impassively. He knows she’s more expressive with Goodsir, the two of them practically have conversations—it would be infuriating, if he weren’t far beyond caring what information she’s hiding. She won’t share it, so he won’t waste his time fishing for it.

            “Don’t follow. I won’t see you again, I won’t bother you, and you don’t bother me, ok? I don’t want to see either of you again. You two stay here and die, since that’s what you’re so determined to do—not me.”

            She nods. He takes several steps backwards, staring at her, and something odd swells in his chest, some terrible, enormous dread, like black tar filling every crevice, stopping up his lungs and heart. He chokes on it. What is it—does he want suddenly to fall to her feet and grip her ankles, to be strung up by his neck and hung, to spit in her face, what, what? Goodsir’s horrid forgiveness echoes in his head, and he wishes he’d wrung the man’s neck before he’d gotten to say it, because now it will haunt Hickey for as long as he lives—the words hide something from him, beneath their surface is another message he can’t decipher. Surely it can’t be that he wants to _apologize_ to her? And for what? For the terror on her face, when he and his men had stolen her away? Yes—for the terror on her face, for the confusion and pain? No—no, never, he feels no remorse, guilt is an invention, it isn’t real, shame is falsehood, brought upon oneself to stamp out impulses the state dislikes in its subjects, he won’t give in to it, he’s worked hard to squash and suffocate his ability to feel remorse, he’s kicked it numb, he’ll kick it down again, now—it cowers and quakes, it trembles, he can hardly make it stay down.

            He turns from her and runs, and as she recedes into the background he runs all the harder, because still he feels her eyes on him, still the thing he was fleeing pursues him though she stays still—he cannot outrun his own unruly, mutinous flesh that is suddenly rebelling, his heart throttling itself high in his throat so that he can taste it as it pumps.

            _You felt sorry,_ Billy says. _I know it—you felt sorry._

            “No!” Hickey gasps, out of breath from sprinting, his lungs stinging from the cold air and from shock, unused to such vigorous exertion. His body is wasted, all skin and bones. “No, you’re wrong. I have no pity. Not for her, not for anybody.”

            _No, no, not for anyone—you don’t even know what pity is, do you? You wouldn’t know how to feel it—no one ever showed you any._  

           “I don’t need to be pitied,” he snarls. “All I need is a way off this bloody hunk of ice. There’s got to be—”

            He stops. A grin spreads across his face. “There is. Remember, Billy—something you heard old Franklin say—Fury Beach. Ross’ old cache. There’ll be supplies there, surely there will be—I can’t imagine why Crozier didn’t bring us there first thing himself, the idiot.”

            _That’s a long way for one man, Cornelius. And you’re not well at all._

            “What are you talking about? I’m well—I’m perfectly able.”

            _That arm’s been looking a little red lately, hasn’t it? Doesn’t it hurt?_

            “I’m going to make it,” Hickey says, hiking his bag further up his shoulder and walking hurriedly now.

      _You don’t know the way._

            “I do, I do know the way—and you must remember, too, come on, help me. If I get out, will you come too? How does it work, are you stuck?”

           _It doesn’t matter—neither of us will leave._

            “We will. There’ll be a ship—a ship will come, yes, ships _do_ come, to certain places, we’re not totally isolated, if we make it far enough—oh, what if an American ship comes? I won’t get on an English ship, never again—but an American ship—yes—I think I’d like it there, don’t you?”

            _You’d make a good American. You already enjoy bleeding your country dry._

            “Yes—there will be an American ship—they’ll take me away, and from there—I could do anything. I could _be_ anything. I’ll be something new there. I’ll be something different, that I’ve never been before.”

       _Something worse?_

            “Just different.”

            He walks mechanically, without paying attention to the direction or to how all his joints ache, how each step drives a nail up to the root of every tooth. The sun blares down and blinds him as it bounces off the white and grey land. He starts to laugh—he walks faster, a surge of energy overcoming him along with a feeling of bliss—he is suddenly deliriously happy. He hums while he walks.

            Time becomes liquid and rushes on ahead of him, trickles away. He slides along it. He can only measure it by his flagging momentum; by how much more his muscles burn now than they did, by the escalating degrees of nausea. It could be days—it could be an eternity—it might have been an hour—no, no, it couldn’t have just been an hour. His skin feels like there are hot coals pressed against the inside of it, his organs are lumps of heavy dough coagulating inside of him, becoming stone. His skull is full of a great howling whirlwind. Still he walks on, and on, and on. When it gets hot he takes off his jacket, and then his overshirt. He doesn’t know if he stuffs them in his bag or tosses them behind—he doesn’t remember, he can’t stop to check, not even when it gets cold again, he won’t delay for even a second.

            At last something on the horizon seems to flicker.

            “Is that water?” he says. “Look there—isn’t that water? That’s the sea, isn’t it?”

            _Yes, that’s the sea. You’re very close now._

            “I told you we’d make it,” he says, grinning and triumphant. There’s a lit torch stuffed down his throat and burning in his mouth. The smoke is filling his head. It doesn’t matter—it can’t hurt him. He’ll endure anything, he’ll walk through fire over a bed of nails now that he can see the end.

     _You did. You’re almost there._

            “And you’ll come?”

         _Yes, I think so._

            “I’m glad you haunted me—it makes me care more for you—I knew you had it in you. I’m glad it’s you, and not anybody else.”

            _Yes. Is there anything else you’d like to say to me, before you get there? Anything at all?_

            “What—I don’t know, should there be?” 

            _There is or there isn’t._

            “I…” Hickey’s brow furrows. He’s gone deathly pale and broken out in a cold sweat, but doesn’t bother wiping it away as it drips down into his eyes. “You don’t resent me, do you?”

            _For what?_

            “For…for…”

            _For killing me? No. Not for that._

            “Then…there’s something else, you mean?”

            _You started killing me before that—long before that. Very slowly, drop by drop, like poison._

            “What do you mean?” Hickey snaps. “I did no such thing.”

            _I never did know, not even until the end, if any of it ever meant anything at all to you._

            “You ended things, remember? Not me. Forgetting that, aren’t you?”

            _No, I’m not—if I’d known, maybe I wouldn’t have._

            “No—you were scared of a beating, that’s all.”

            _Well? You haven’t answered. And why shouldn’t I fear a beating, what would I take a beating for—there were other men you could get what you wanted from._

            “I cared for you,” Hickey snarls. “Why do you need everything spelled out? What do you want, a love letter?”

        _Hardly._

            “Good, you won’t get one.”

           _I know—I’m not even sure you can write._

            “What’s this all about? I did care—it’s not fair of you to come in afterwards with a thousand reasons why I didn’t—who are you to say, you and Goodsir and everybody else are all alike, thinking you get to decide who can care, and who can’t.”

            _How can you care, if you can’t even pity? How can you care like that, in the way I mean?_

            “I can—because—oh, damn you all, trapping me like this,” he mutters, throwing up his hand. His bag falls to the ground, but he hardly notices—he’s gone numb.

            _I was dying—why bother ending it early, if the result is the same?_

            “Because it was slow and painful! Oh, you all said _I_ was the tricky one, now look what you’ve done,” he moans, putting his face in his hand. “Yes, alright, I pitied you, I get it, that’s what you’ve been trying to make me see—are you happy now? I was horribly sorry for you, and I’m sorry now about her, though she’s cursed me and her monster’s nearly killed me—what did you all expect, aren’t I a man, too? I can feel things also—I know how that disturbs you all, how I can feel just as you feel, you think I shouldn’t be able—but I can, and I do, only I don’t know _how_ to do it any other way, and most of all I wanted to live—I won’t explain myself, I shouldn’t have to, and anyway I can’t. It doesn’t matter, because this is the ocean, isn’t it? We’re here.”

_Yes, yes, we’re here._

            “We made it,” Hickey mumbles, and then his knees give up and he buckles. He drags himself forward a ways, to the glimmering edge of where the water laps against the shore, and then he sits and stares out at the wavering horizon, which appears lit with white flame; a gentle white flame, like a curtain or a moth’s wing fluttering. He drags his remaining fingers through the water and then touches their tips gently to what’s left of his tongue.

            “It doesn’t taste like water,” he says. “I don’t taste salt—it tastes of nothing.”

            _Don’t worry, you’re just very cold and numb, that’s all. It’ll all get sorted out once you’re on board, they’ll take care of everything._

            “Are those sails?” he mumbles. He thinks he can see them, far in the distance, coming out of the flickering white fire on the horizon—billowing, light grey sails.

         _Yes, there’s a ship._

            “A ship. An American ship. Do you think? I hope it’s an American ship.”

         _Maybe._

            “What’s it doing?” he said. It didn’t seem to come any closer—just hovered there, far off shore.

           _You have to be patient—it might take a while. You’ve come this far, what’s a little longer?_

            The horizon was narrowing, drawing in at the edges, as though great black satin curtains were closing, so that the thinning strip of grey and white made a narrowing channel up from the sea into the sky, with the boat suspended in its center. The sun was bright and cold. His teeth chattered and the tips of his fingers and nose burned with numbness. As he waited, a dreamy, mysterious smile spread across his face, and he thought of all the things he might do and of what he might become in America.

 

 

            For many days upon days Goodsir and Silna pulled the sled which held all their belongings, and they slept beside each other to keep warm, and so that if one could not sleep or woke afraid and tearful, the other could pull them close and hold them. At night he told her stories about his life back home—about his medical training, and his family, and his childhood, and the stories were mostly good because he liked to linger on all the ways people had been decent and kind, but he did not lie or cover up the times they had been otherwise. During the day they began to make up their own language, stitched together by what she knew of her people’s sign language, of what sounds she could still articulate now that there was no cause to maintain total silence when it was just the two of them, and new gestures they invented themselves. Mostly they could communicate through a touch or a look alone; this was enough, as they spent almost every moment together, so there was little need to say what the other did not already know; the communication was mostly for feelings alone, which could be well expressed without words so long as they were honest, and they were.

            So the days rolled out before and behind them like a long carpet, each relatively the same as the last, and it was good to pull the sled and walk side by side beneath the broad white sky, upon the tough grey land.

            One day as on countless other days a hill rose before them; when the reached its summit they looked down and saw in the distance a gathering of tents of stretched animal skins, and a grey plume of smoke from some far off fire burning in the settlement. They looked at it for a long time, in silence; then they looked at each other, and they smiled; their smiles were full of a most fragile hope that could be swept away in an instant; but beneath it was the solid bedrock formed of a deeper hope that could not be shaken and would go on and on without ever being depleted. So they again picked up their sled and walked on, not knowing how they would be greeted or if they would be welcomed.


End file.
